Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community – 2019.09.13

Sasha Rosenbaum

September 13th, 20190 0

This week the community presented me with a good problem to have – too much great content! Even after paring it down, there is still a lot I wanted to share. Arm yourself with a fresh beverage, we are about to dive in!

Measuring your way around Azure DevOps
Many companies are interested in better understanding and optimizing their usage of SaaS tools such as Azure DevOps. Luckily, the usage metrics are available via the Azure DevOps Analytics API. In this great post, Wouter de Kort is using the Analytics API endpoint to gather the Azure Pipelines usage data, and visualizing it with PowerBI. Having these insights available at a glance allows you to get a clear picture of your Pipelines usage and eliminate any bottlenecks!

PVS-Studio Analyzer
Speaking of optimization, there is a mounting push in the industry to optimize our code for clarity, bug elimination and security. This post from the PVS-Studio blog covers the static code analysis tool’s integration with Azure DevOps. Yet another way to use automation to improve your code quality!

Better Octopus Integration with Azure DevOps
While we are on the topic of extensibility, this great post from Rob Pearson covers the new capabilities in the Azure DevOps Octopus extension. The new extension improves the integration with the Octopus Server Spaces. It also uses Work Items integration to track what new features and bug fixes are available in each release, making the summary easy to view and send notifications on!

Deploying AKS with Terraform and Azure DevOps
This blog came to me with a bit of delay, but I wanted to add it to our Azure DevOps with Terraform collection. Here, Nicolas Yuen covers the deployment of AKS using Azure Pipelines and Terraform. It is great to see that the post features an integration with Azure KeyVault, making sure that your secrets aren’t stored in source control! I also love the fact that most blogs nowadays feature a link to the source repository in GitHub, making it easier to get started using the sample code.

Day 7 – Using Azure CLI in Your Everyday IaC Strategy
GitHub also serves as a blog engine in it’s own right! This post by Ryan Irujo is part of the 100 days of Infrastructure-as-Code journey, focusing on using Azure CLI in combination with Azure Pipelines to create a release pipeline for your infrastructure. We all love declarative syntax, but sometimes imperative code can be even more powerful!

Sitecore.com Continuous Deployment on Azure (2019 Edition)
It’s been a while since we’ve discussed branching and deployment strategies. This post from Alexander Doroshenko covers Sitecore’s current on-prem and Azure deployment strategies, which are using Azure DevOps and the Sitecore Deploy extension. Great to see that Sitecore uses a branching strategy similar to what we do internally!

Azure DevOps Postman Collections
To close the circle with another REST API example, I recently came across this community-driven collection of Postman calls for the Azure DevOps REST API. This is a great way to get started with some useful samples of what is available in our REST API. Thank you, Hosam Kamel, for driving this effort!

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!