Ever thought about what it takes to host a game in the Cloud? Well, this is the series for you! On the first Wednesday of every month, we explore Cloud Concepts that impact your journey to a connected multiplayer gaming experience! In this second session, we’ll play some Halo and talk about matchmaking services and how ensuring a resilient service is crucial to an end gamer’s experience.

Hopefully by now you’ve had a chance to read part 1 of this series, which explains why you may be interested in using GPG keys to sign your commits. Congratulations on getting to the second part! In part two, we’re going to focus on how I worked through setting up GPG in my Windows environment, and generating a set of keys for use. There were some challenges/hurdles along the way, and we’ll talk through those too!

In this video, Chris recaps over the last week, including The GitHub & GPG Keys blog series, his webinar with SquaredUp on Application Observability in a distributed world and the Introduction to Landing Zones, where he was joined by Karim Fahmy. This week, it’s Microsoft Ignite, so keep a watch out for any news/updates! In addition, on Wednesday - the second episode of Cloud Gaming notes will be released, as well as the second in The GitHub & GPG Keys blog series. On Friday, there will be another episode with Peter Piper, as Chris and Peter explore the Ambassador and Sidecar Patterns. Finally, on Saturday - Chris will be presenting to Dotnet Limerick Azure User Group on using GitHub to deploy a Podcast Site/Blog to Azure using Static Content… And if that wasn’t enough, Chris also rounds up some of the latest Azure Blog posts, and a series of retirement notices from the Azure Updates page.

Heard about something called a Landing Zone, and think you need a helicopter ready to use it? Not quite! In this session, Chris is joined by Karim Fahmy as they discuss an introduction to Azure Landing Zones and how they underpin some of the core cloud foundations (e.g. governance, networking, core infrastructure and more) to enable a successful cloud deployment

Join Chris Reddington, Senior FastTrack for Azure Engineer at Microsoft for this Azure Management Talk webinar. Chris will provide an overview of Application Insights and how it slots into the wider Azure Monitoring ecosystem. We will explore Alerts, Metrics, Queries, Dashboards, Workbooks and more, and how Application Insights can bring clarity to a distributed cloud deployment.

For a while now, I’ve been using GPG Keys to sign my Git Commits to prove that my commits on GitHub are genuine and from me. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been inspired by a couple of colleagues (Kudos to Adrian and Julie if you’re reading this) to dig out my YubiKey and use these for my key signing activities. While there are several blog posts on the topic already, I encountered a number of roadblocks along the way. The intent of this blog post is to be the first of a series, where we’ll explore what GPG is, why it may be valuable to you and how you can get going using them. We’ll then take this forwards an additional step, and show how you can use YubiKeys as a second factor of verification and the benefits of this approach. By no means am I the world’s expert in cryptography, and some of these topics, but I wanted to document my own understanding for posterity, as I’ll inevitably need to repeat/review the process in the future. I hope that this may be useful to you.

In this video, Chris recaps the events over the last week, including his transition from FastTrack for Azure Engineer into a Cloud Solution Architect, The Compute Resource Consolidation Pattern and being ‘In Conversation with’ JonnyChipz and the relaunch of Azure Thames Valley! This week, expect an additional blog post on GitHub and GPG, as well as an Intro to Landing Zones with Karim Fahmy. Don’t forget to checkout the session with Squared Up on Thursday as well! It’s a busy week! The last one has been busy for the Azure Enginering teams, as we recap some of the updates (This is one not to miss - There’s a lot!)

Mr Chris Reddington talks to us about his life as a Microsoft Azure Fast Track Engineer and some of the pain points he helps Customer navigate. We discuss DevOps and Infrastructure as Code as well as key skills needed for this modern IT world we now live in and more!

Have you deployed your application in a way that it needs compute dedicated for each instance? Perhaps you have an app which could be deployed as a Software as a Service/multi-tenanted app, but still have a deployment per tenant? Well, find out how the Compute Resource Consolidation Pattern could be saving you cost in this episode of Cloud With Chris. This is another episode in the series of Architecting for the Cloud, one pattern at a time. at a time.

For the past four years, I’ve been part of a team at Microsoft called FastTrack for Azure. FastTrack for Azure is part of Azure Engineering’s Customer Experience Team, focused on successfully on boarding customers on a project-by-project basis as they bring production workloads online. There is never a perfect time to say goodbye, but for me - now is the time. From Monday, I’ll be taking on a new role within Microsoft as a Senior Cloud Solution Architect within Microsoft UK’s Customer Success Unit, focusing on the Manufacturing & Resources Industries. Career changes can be big moments of change, and a good opportunity to reflect.