UK Community Session: Create friction-free code across all tools and frameworks

Microsoft Cloud Advocate Dean Bryen is joined by guests Carole Logan (developer and tech lead based in Glasgow) and Chris Reddington (Microsoft Cloud Solution Architect) as they take you through the end-to-end process of editing, committing and deploying code across different platforms and tools. We’ll end with a Q&A session and next steps for you to try the process out for yourself to see how agile and collaborative it is. We look forward to seeing you there!

Talk

May 26, 2021
How GitHub Actions can help in building and deploying a static website and more

Chris is a Cloud Solution Architect at Microsoft. He’ll provide an overview of GitHub and explore how GitHub Actions can be used to build and deploy your own static sites (or other apps!) to Azure.

Talk

May 25, 2021
Making a GitHub Action with Docker and .NET Core

As I’m using GitHub Actions to deploy my site to Azure, it made sense for me to build a GitHub action that I can use within my GitHub Actions workflow to cross-post content. That’s exactly what I’ll be talking about in this blog post!

Blog

May 24, 2021
36 - Application Insights: The Tool You Never Knew You Needed

Understanding how our applications function in the wild is essential for developers when issues arise. With the power of knowledge, we can enable ourselves to provide the best experience to our fellow developers, and our stakeholders. One of the solutions that supplies this power is Application Insights. Application Insights is a service provided by Microsoft allowing you to monitor your application live, detect performance anomalies, and observe this data with powerful analytics. Together we will see how easy it is to add Application Insights to our applications, whether we have access to the codebase or not. Once instrumented, we will dive deeper into the capabilities of Application Insights and show how to leverage all the rich data collected from our application. Finally, as developers the last thing we want to do is troubleshoot an issue in Production, with everyone watching and the stakes are high. Watch as we monitor a live application that is throwing exceptions and how Application Insights can be used to help us solve the problem faster. When we are done, attendees will be empowered with the knowledge to leverage Application Insights to be more productive with their work.

Episode

May 21, 2021
Cloud Lunch and Learn Marathon 2021 - Using Hugo, Azure Storage and Azure CDN for a cheap & performant site on Azure

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.

Talk

May 13, 2021
Cloud Lunch and Learn Marathon 2021 - How GitHub Actions can help in building and deploying a static site and more

Chris is the producer and host of his podcast CloudWithChris.com. He uses GitHub to version control the site’s source code, GitHub Actions to build and deploy the site to Azure and other clouds, and GitHub Issues/Boards to plan the episode backlog. In this session, we’ll explore how GitHub can be used to deploy your own workloads to Azure.

Talk

May 13, 2021
Cloud Lunch and Learn Marathon 2021 - Requirements, Design Patterns, Cloud Architecture... Oh My

In this session, we’ll navigate through a typical journey when designing the architecture of a cloud solution and consider the decisions that we may wish to make at various stages. Alongside that, we’ll factor in how requirements and design patterns can help influence our overall design.

Talk

May 13, 2021
Cloud Drops - Pipelines as Code

You may have heard about Software Code or Infrastructure as Code. Well, in this video, we’ll be talking about pipelines as code. If you’re familiar with tools like Azure DevOps, Circle CI, GitHub, GitLab and Jenkins, you may notice a trend where these platforms are allowing you to define your pipelines as code. Throughout this video, we’ll be defining a multi-stage pipeline in Azure DevOps, and picking up some tips along the way.

Episode

May 11, 2021
Azure Pipelines Tips

Recently on Twitter, I was asked by @thegraycat on whether I knew of any resources to manage pipelines in version control. I sent across several top of mind thoughts over Twitter, but it got me thinking that there may be others with the same question and it could make a good blog post. So here we are, as I talk through some of my considerations for pipelines as code.

Blog

May 10, 2021
GitHub Actions and Azure - Using Environments with GitHub Actions

You have a working set of GitHub actions, but several environments that you want to deploy into. How do you easily separate secrets for use between environments, and ensure you have approvals before releasing into production? For that, you’ll need to use Environments! We’ll explore those in this episode of Cloud with Chris!

Episode

May 7, 2021