Welcome Back!

Azure Citadel

First all, we know we have regular users of this site, so thank you for your patience whilst we have reworked everything to the new theme! It took a little while, but we think the results are worth it.

For those of you who are new to the site then please take a few moments to read the about and disclaimer pages.

The main reason for making the change was to restructure the content and make it easier for you to navigate around the larger labs. (The multi page labs are the most popular on the site.)

In doing so we also introduced a number of other features.

New domain name

We have registered and moved to azurecitadel.com. We thought it was about time we registered the domain name to make it easier to get to the site.

Most of the old short urls should still work, such as https://aka.ms/citadel and https://aka.ms/citadel/kubernetes.

News section

This is the first article in the news section! We will post in here when we add major new content, or significantly update an existing lab.

You will also find a link to the news section’sRSS Atom feed at the bottom of every page. We use the feed ourselves, in both Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Outlook.

In these days of GDPR and PII data rules then we may consider using this as a way of broadcasting key UK OCP updates to those who have subscribed to the feed.

Reworked structure

We have moved away from the old categorisation of workshops, labs, videos, etc. as it became difficult to navigate as the amount of content grew. We now have more natural groupings of technology, so please explore the category link. The level of innovation with cloud is enormous so expect these to shift and change over time.

We will also have designated content curators for each category so that we can retire content when it becomes outdated, and they’ll work with frequent contributors to determine gaps in content that we’d like to address.

Integrated search

Search has been supercharged for the new site, and is both effective and fast to use. Ben has documented a guide showing how he combined Azure Search and Azure Pipelines to get updated search indexes on a statically generated Jekyll site.

Lab Navigation

Every page has an auto-generated navigation page on the right with the H1 and H2 headers listed so that you can quickly move between sections of the longer labs.

And some of the multi-page labs now have custom navigation links on the left (underneath the author info) so that you can move between those lab pages easily.

Author information

The author information is far richer, and supports multiple authors better.

If you enjoy one of the labs then check out the author’s Twitter and LinkedIn accounts as most are active on social media platforms. Some of the contributors also have great content on their own blog sites so we can now link to those websites too.

Contributing to Citadel

Whilst much of the content on here has been contributed by Cloud Solution Architects working for the Microsoft UK One Commercial Partner group, this is very much a community site. It is not an offical Microsoft site. It is hosted in GitHub in a public repo and it is open to all to contribute.

Some of the content has been contributed by other parts of Microsoft and by the wider public, and we very much thank those who take the time to correct our mistakes and make the labs clearer for all!

If you wish to contribute to the site than bear with us as we update the contributing page to reflect the new theme and the changes and options that has introduced.

We hope you enjoy the new site and the content we have planned for 2019!