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Matt Allford's Newsletter | Issue 15
Published over 1 year ago • 2 min read
Hey, it's Matt.
Whoops, it's been a little while. Things have been busy, we're doing some renovations at home and had to move out, and it is winter where I am, which has meant cold, miserable weather, with plenty of colds circling around. We're almost at the start of Spring, though!
As usual I've collected a few pieces of information below that I hope you find helpful, as well as the usual podcast recommendation at the bottom.
Talk soon, Matt.
GitHub Hosted Runner Azure VNET Integration
I teased this in last newsletter, and I did end up releasing a deep dive video on YouTube about newly released functionality from GitHub, allowing you to integrated GitHub hosted runners with your Azure Virtual Network. This provides you with the ability to get the benefits of runners hosted and managed by GitHub, but also providing them access to private resources in your environment, whether that be in Azure or on-prem.
Rate My Open API
These days pretty much every application being developed is done with an API mindset, and it makes sense to align your APIs with the Open API standard and specifications.
The folks over at Zuplo (an awesome API Management service) released updates to their "Rate My Open API" site, giving you the ability to rate your API from the web UI, a command line, from within GitHub Actions, and using their API. The reports are fantastic with easy to understand, actionable insights, to bring your API up to industry standards, and with the capabilities to embed checks in your GitHub Actions workflow, you can now ensure your APIs are passing certain thresholds before being released to your environments.
Another awesome feature that recently made its way to public preview are Managed DevOps Pools for Azure DevOps.
Managed DevOps Pools are a fully managed service, where VMs used as pipeline agents are provisioned and managed by Microsoft, but you have a lot of flexibility around connecting them to your private networks, bringing your own image (or choosing from a range of quick start images), selecting which geographic location to have your agents in, and much, much more.
This new capability is a welcome feature above and beyond running VM Scale Sets in your own environment, which came with a fair amount of maintenance and troubleshooting.
Using Azure Front Door? By default with logging on Azure Front Door, the details about the request are logged in clear text, and may contain sensitive information.
Microsoft now allows you to configure scrubbing on the Front Door logs, scrubbing the Request URI, Request IP address, and the query string.
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To use the words from their website, Chaos Lever is "A tech podcast tracking emerging trends in IT and why they're all terrible.".
Every week Ned Bellavance and Chris Hayner release an easy to listen 10-minute "news of the week" podcast, as well as a longer format podcast doing a deep dive on a specific area of our wonderful world of technology.
Between the snark, humor, and banter, Chris and Ned do an amazing job of unpacking topics, often including a deep dive into the topic at hand, discussing how we got here, and what the hell it all means.
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Hey, it's Matt. I hope you've all been out there vibe coding your ideas into MVPs. I'm looking forward to a bit of a break over Easter. The family and I are going away for three nights down to a spot on the east coast of Tasmania. I've got a couple of books lined up to read that I've found myself not getting to this year, but fingers crossed the weather holds out as it is starting to cool off down here as we approach Winter! I've pulled together a few resources I've seen recently, and thought...
Hey, it's Matt. And there goes January - that was quick! Down here in Tasmania it's been great weather, and the kids are about to go back to school (finally!). I spent a bit of time today putting together a list of tech I want to dive into and learn this year, and before I knew it the list was massive! This really is such a broad field with a lot going on. I don't know about you, but I often feel overwhelmed with the amount of technology flying across my socials that I have no idea about. But...
Hey, it's Matt. Whoops, it's been a little while. Hoping you've had a great Christmas, and maybe able to step away from work for a week or two! I've got a goal to get this newsletter on a proper cadence in 2025. Hopefully fortnightly, but at least monthly is my initial goal. As usual I've collected a few pieces of information below that I hope you find helpful, as well as the usual podcast recommendation at the bottom. Talk soon, Matt. Azure CDN from Edgio Retiring on Jan 15 2025 As well as...
