Hey, it's Matt.

A couple of weeks ago I made the trip over to Salt Lake City where Pluralsight's HQ is located, for their annual Author Summit event. I was there for a short trip of 4 days, but those 4 days were packed from end to end with fantastic content and discussions, catching up with old friends, and making new friends.

I was able to meet some people in person that I've worked with over the last 3 years, but in general chatting with both folks from Pluralsight in addition to the author community was so fulfilling, and surrounding yourself with likeminded, genuinely awesome humans was amazing, it will be and event on my agenda for years to come.

We're officially in Q4 for the calendar year, on the countdown to the end of the year. I've got a packed couple of months and will be looking forward to some down time over the Christmas period.

I hope you enjoy this edition of the newsletter, there's heaps going on out there in the tech world as usual!

Talk soon, Matt.

GitHub Copilot Chat Beta Available for All Individuals

For the last few months, GitHub have been running a public beta of their Copilot Chat feature for business users. They recently released a public beta of Copilot Chat for all GitHub Copilot individual users.

This gives you a chat interface embedded in to Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code, giving you the ability to chat with Copilot in natural language about your code, without leaving the IDE!

If you're a Copilot user, make sure to check out the Copilot Chat beta.

Azure Virtual Machine Default Outbound Internet Access Change

Today when you deploy a virtual machine to Azure, without needing to perform any additional explicit configuration, the machine has default outbound access, which enabled outbound connectivity to the internet.

While it would be recommended to put configuration in place to explicitly allow the outbound access, such as a NAT gateway or by being assigned an Azure public IP address, to date this hasn't been required.

That is changing on the 30th of September 2025, where default outbound access connectivity for virtual machines in Azure will be retired, and all new VMs will need to use an explicit outbound connectivity method if the machine requires internet access.

Read more about the announcement here, and NAT Gateway may or may not have just made its way toward the top of my list for a new YouTube video, so a shameless plug to subscribe to my channel using the links at the bottom of this newsletter if you want to see how to configure the NAT Gateway!

az aks copilot Preview Feature

Staying on a bit of a theme around copilot and chatbots, did you know there is a copilot capability in the Azure CLI az aks subset of commands, allowing you to leverage this for guidance and troubleshooting of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) right from the terminal?

Microsoft MVP and Cloud Native advocate Richard Hooper, AKA PixelRobots, put out this fantastic post on the what, the why, and how to get started. Make sure to give this a read, and follow Richard on the socials if you don't already!

Azure Back to School is Finished!

For the past few newsletters, I plugged the Azure Back to School event, which has now come to an end at the end of September!

This is a community event, and as the name implies, the content topic is really anything and everything to do with the Azure ecosystem.

Content is in the form of blog posts, recorded videos, and live streams. Click on the icon below to be taken to the session schedule and you can find all the links to sessions from there.

This was a fantastic year of content and I've got a lot on my backlog to watch through. Fantastic job to everyone who submitted content this year!

Did you know I author content over on the Pluralsight platform?

If you're a subscriber, this is a shameless plug to check out my courses! I publish content in the IT Ops and Cloud spaces, make sure to give me a follow on the page below to get alerted when I release a new course.

If you're not a subscriber, click on the Pluralsight logo above to get taken to a 10 day trial sign up page!

Festive Tech Calendar 2023

As one community event (Azure Back to School) comes to a close, another opens up a call for papers, and it's that time of year again where the Festive Tech Calendar call for speakers is open.

Festive Tech Calendar is a fantastic community event run by members of the community, aimed to be a month-long event during December, where you can share any and all content on any technical subject, but typically in the form of:

• Deep technical content in the form of a video or blog post
• Something actionable such as a workshop, hackathon, or project
• Ask Me Anything Sessions
• Live streams

Check out the main site by clicking on the image below, which has a link to sessionize with more information, and is where you can submit your session. I look forward to seeing the awesome content the community look to share to round out the year!

Podcast Recommendation

I'm back to recommending a podcast that is no longer being produced, but there's so much value in the content available that I think it's still worth sharing.

The recommendation this newsletter goes to none other than the Datanauts podcast which is a part of the Packet Pushers network, and hosted by Ethan Banks and Chris Wahl.

I learned so much by listening to every episode of this podcast, from breaking down tech silos, to being an infrastructure engineer opening up the world of cloud looking at IaC and REST APIs, and a bunch of shows around soft skills, and everything in between.

There are 172 (technically 173, but the last one was a farewell podcast) episodes of goodness waiting for your hears, click on the link below to be taken to the landing page at Packet Pushers, or search them up on your favorite podcatcher!

Follow and connect with me on the social platforms below.

​​​​

600 1st Ave, Ste 330 PMB 92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2246
​Unsubscribe · Preferences​