It’s hard to believe that 2021 is done, and we’re now in 2022. In one sense, it feels like a ‘blink and you miss it’ year. In another way, it feels as though it’s been one of the longest years to have passed us by.

It’s fair to say that 2021 has had its challenges, not least in the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. You may have caught my recent blog post on my mental health challenges. Practicing mindfulness and gratitude are excellent approaches for me to keep my overall mental health in balance. So, this post is just as much for me as anyone else. I want to highlight the achievements from the last year or so. I won’t be setting any resolutions for 2021, but want to build upon what I’ve learned in 2021.

Azure Arc is a suite of Azure Services that simplifies management of workloads in a Hybrid and Multicloud deployment. You’ve likely heard about this from the Infrastructure or Virtual Machine perspective, but how can it help with your applications? We’ll explore how App Services, Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Event Grid and API Management Gateways can be deployed to on-premises and other clouds using Azure Arc!

Are you now working with source code? Whether that’s Application Code, Infrastructure as Code, Database Schemas or Data Science workbooks as code, you may have heard of a term ‘Continuous Integration’ (CI). This is the process of regularly merging code, and running a series of automated builds/tests/checks to ensure that quality remains high in your production codebase. Find out more in this video.

In this video, Chris provides another update on Cloud with Chris, updates on what’s coming soon and Azure related news!

In this video, Chris provides another update on Cloud with Chris, updates on what’s coming soon and the Azure, Azure DevOps and GitHub news!

If you follow the news around Microsoft, you’ve probably found it very hard to miss the fact that the Microsoft //Build conference happened this week. Microsoft //Build is their annual developer-focused conference, where they typically announce new features, updates and share their strategy as they evolve technologies. In this update, I’ll provide a summary of the announcements that particularly stood out to me and give you some context around why. Whether that’s announcements that excite me, features that I think are crucial to be adopted, etc. It’s worth noting that I’ll be focusing primarily on the Microsoft Azure Updates here, as that’s my typical area of expertise!

Have you heard about Azure Event Grid, but not exactly sure what it is or how you could use it? In this Cloud Drop, we’ll create an event-driven process using Azure Event Grid, Azure Storage Queues and Azure Functions. Get ready to learn all about Event-Driven workflows, Event-Handlers, Topics, Subscriptions and more!

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.

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!

Have you wanted to get started learning Azure, but you’re not quite sure where to start? Then you need to check out Microsoft Learn! Microsoft Learn is a hub for learning content, including modules and learning paths, information around the official Microsoft certifications, and a curated video platform called learn tv.