Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community – 2019.07.19

Sasha Rosenbaum

July 19th, 20190 0

This week was packed with action at MSInspire and MSReady. It was remarkable to see the innovation in Satya Nadella’s corenote. We truly live in the future!

As a cherry on top, this community shared some amazing stories this week. I am so proud that our Azure DevOps Open Source program is enabling more and more teams around the world to provide value to the community!

Migrating the Test-Kitchen Project to Azure Pipelines
Testing has been a part of the developer lifecycle for decades, but until a few years ago no one realized that the same concepts could be applied in the infrastructure world as well. That is, until the Test-Kitchen was born. Test-Kitchen is an Open Source project that allows you to verify that your VMs will be in the expected state after you provision your infrastructure as code using tools such as Chef, Puppet or Ansible. Last month, Steven Murawski helped the Test Kitchen community move the project to Azure Pipelines, which allowed it to take advantage of the free unlimited Build minutes for Open Source projects, run the Builds on Windows, Linux and MacOS hosted agents, and even shorten the Build times. Thank you for trusting us with this important effort!

How Home Assistant is using Azure Pipelines to automate all the things.
It is stories like this that make me proud to be a part of this team. Paulus Schoutsen and his team at Home Assistant chose to leverage Azure Pipelines Open Source program to automate the continuous integration and the release creation process on self-hosted custom Linux agents, and worked with Microsoft to work out the kinks and increase the number of available free build agents. The article even has a link to the Azure DevOps dashboard where you can view the current Build status of Home Assistant components!

Building Azure DevOps Extension on Azure DevOps – Implementation
I recently had a number of people ask me about the process of creating custom Tasks for Azure Pipelines. With Azure DevOps, you can create and share custom tasks, dashboard widgets and work item customizations by publishing extensions to our Marketplace. You can also choose to make the extensions available only to your organization, or to the entire community. Justin Yoo comes out with a timely post describing the process of building a new Azure DevOps extension for Netlify. And, once you are done with the implementation part, you can follow Justin’s next guide for extension publisher registration

Azure DevOps & Teams Integration = Perfect Match
Another topic that comes up a lot lately is the integration between Azure DevOps and Microsoft Teams. This post from Steve Buchanan will walk you through using Azure DevOps Dashboards and Kanban Boards via Teams, as well as setting up Teams channel notifications for Repos and Pipelines activity. Give it a try!

Introduction to Azure DevOps
And if you are new to Azure DevOps and all of the above articles got you excited to explore the tool, here is an introductory overview from Digital Varys on all the product components and the value they provide.

Thank you, everyone! The stories you share underscore to me that the Azure DevOps team is truly living the Microsoft mission – to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

If you’ve written an article about Azure DevOps or find some great content about DevOps on Azure, please share it with the #AzureDevOps hashtag on Twitter!