Azure Storage

In this episode, Chris is joined by Matt Bradley! Matt helped start the Public Cloud Division at UKFast. While UKFast works with both AWS and Azure, Matt’s focus is on the Azure side, dealing with architecting and building solutions. Matt has delivered several talks within the community, including ‘The Azure Storage Minefield’. Join Chris and Matt as they talk through some of Matt’s learnings along the way and observations as he has been on his own journey with Azure and public Cloud!

We often hear about Kubernetes, App Services, Virtual Machines and more. But did you ever think about using Azure Storage to host your sites? The Static Content Hosting pattern is a cost-effective way to host your sites, combined with a CDN can be incredibly performant! Chris will show how he uses these patterns, along with GitHub Actions to deploy and maintain his CloudWithChris.com podcast.

We often hear about Kubernetes, App Services, Virtual Machines and more. But did you ever think about using Azure Storage to host your sites? The Static Content Hosting pattern is a cost-effective way to host your websites, combined with a CDN can be incredibly performant! Chris will show how he uses these patterns, along with GitHub Actions to deploy and maintain his CloudWithChris.com podcast.

Many years ago, I wrote a blog post which introduced Logic Apps at a very high level when they were initially released. Ahead of a blog post that I want to write on Logic Apps v2, I thought that it may be worth writing a more thorough recap of Logic Apps as a platform. Logic Apps is a Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, which allows you to easily build visual workflow integrations. Whether that’s plumbing several microservices together, entirely different solutions within an enterprise, or some of the repetitive backend administrative tasks for a podcast or blog site, Logic Apps may be worth exploring.

Principal of least privilege is a commonly used phrase within the Technology Industry. The idea is that we’ll assign permissions of what the user needs to get the job done, rather than anything broader or more privileged. This helps reduce the blast radius in the event of a compromised account. This stretches to Azure resources at the management plane, but in some cases can also stretch to the data plane of those resources. We’ll be exploring these further in this blog post.

We often hear about Kubernetes, App Services, Virtual Machines and more. But did you ever think about using Azure Storage to host your sites? The Static Content Hosting pattern is a cost-effective way to host your sites, combined with a CDN can be incredibly performant! Chris will show how he uses these patterns, along with GitHub Actions to deploy and maintain his CloudWithChris.com podcast.

In my blog post earlier this week, I mentioned that I recently spoke at the Northern Azure User Group. The other speaker for the evening was Scott Hanselman, who talked about his journey moving a 17 year old .NET App into Azure. This was his blog. Along the way, he called out some of the tools that he used along the way. One was a tool called securityheaders.com. As any engaged listener does, I took note of the tools that he used, and added them to my cloudwithchris.com backlog during the talk. When I later investigated the initial rating of the site, I received a score of an F - which appears to be the lowest possible score that you can receive! Given that I only allow HTTPS traffic to my site, I was surprised by this - so I begun looking into the recommendations further.

For some time now, I’ve been using Windows Terminal as my local terminal for interacting with my command-line tools for quite some time now. Whenever I’m demonstrating Kubernetes concepts or working with the Azure CLI, I’ll likely have had the Windows Terminal open at some point. I always get questioned about which terminal that is, and how people can get access to it. I recently put together a Cloud Drop on How Windows Terminal can make YOU productive with Azure, so I figured it’s time to also write up a blog post on the same! Whether you’re a Developer, DevOps Engineer, Infrastructure Operations or Data Scientist, you’ve probably had to interact with a command-line terminal / shell at some point, so I hope this will be useful for you!

For some time, I’ve been using GitHub actions to update the content of my site (i.e. pages, descriptions, metadata, etc.). Through Hugo, these content updates automatically update the RSS feeds. This then makes the episodes appear in podcast services such as Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify. However, throughout that time I have been manually uploading the podcast files to my storage account. It wasn’t a significant overhead, but I kept thinking that there must be a better way to do this. And, there is - I’ve implemented it! This blog post will walk you through why I’ve made these changes, how I made them and what the result is.

When I mention the term JAMStack, I’m not pretending that I’m Paddington bear with a stack of Jam sandwiches! If you hadn’t heard, JAMStack is a term that describes applications based on JavaScript, APIs and Markup. That means, we’re referring to files that are content in nature. Think about files like HTML, CSS, Images, etc. Ok, now with that context - why has it risen in popularity? Surely this is something that could have been done for many years, so why now? My hypothesis… Cloud.