Top Stories from the Microsoft DevOps Community – 2019.11.29

Martin Woodward

November 29th, 20191 0

While our American colleagues are busy enjoying their Thanksgiving break, I wanted to post about something I’m extremely thankful for. No not the two days without any meetings this week (although that was awesome), but the incredible DevOps community building exciting things with the help of Azure.

Open Source Cloud Summit Johannesburg – IoT Edge Lab

While folks in the US were busy eating pumpkin pie and fixing their relatives laptops on Thanksgiving, the community on Johannesburg were holding an Open Cloud Summit. Some amazing posts coming out of the #OSSSummitJHB hashtag, but my personal favorite was the Azure IoT Edge Hands On Lab from MVP’s Allan Pead. Neil Zeeman and Allan have ran similar labs at a few IoT Hackdays in South Africa recently (the photo above is from their previous Cape Town session) and I’m very jealous. This latest one from Allan includes all the DevOps goodness and I definitely want to give it a go. In this case you learn how to do CI/CD to a Raspberry Pi based robot using Azure Pipelines. For more information take a look at the Hands On Lab repo on GitHub.

100 Days of Infrastructure as Code in Azure

Ryan Irujo, Pete Zerger and Tao Yang have been learning different areas of Infrastructure as Code in Azure and this week they have been digging more into YAML Pipelines. It’s definitely worth following along with them by adding a watch on their GitHub repo so that you get notified of changes. (Also don’t forget to sign up for the beta of the new GitHub Mobile app if you want to manage your notifications on the go)

How to Configure CI/CD in Azure DevOps

Over on the excellent Redgate Hub sysadmin blog, Joydip Kanjilal posted a very comprehensive run though of the process setting up a basic CI/CD pipeline for a .NET Core app with Visual Studio 2019, Azure Pipelines and Azure. While it’s a demo I do often and there is plenty of help available for, it’s great to see such a simple and detailed walk-through of this ‘bread and butter’ pipeline but aimed at the community of sysadmins. While you are there, be sure to check out the excellent Redgate extensions for Azure DevOps which make doing CD with SQL Server databases a lot easier.

Use GitHub Actions to deploy code to Azure

Popular tech columnist, Simon Bisson, wrote up how to use the new GitHub Actions for Azure to deploy straight from GitHub to your Azure service of choice. After reading his article, if you want to learn more about the GitHub Actions for Azure, check-out the blog post from last week – note that there is even an action to trigger Azure Pipelines which can come in handy should you want to do your CI build using GitHub Actions and then trigger a release using Azure Pipelines.

3 Ways to run Automated Tests on Azure DevOps

On the TechFabric blog, Seleznov Ihor has posted a deep-dive into three ways to run automated tests in Azure Pipelines, Unit tests, UI tests and API tests in this case with a .NET Core application.

Continuous Infrastructure in GCP using Azure Pipelines

Ashish Raj has been on a roll lately with Azure DevOps content and this week was no different with a great look into using GCP with Azure Pipelines and Terraform. His short (15m) video on YouTube is well worth a watch if multi-cloud deployments with Terraform is something you are looking into.

Last but not least, one final thing to be thankful for is that Gene Kim‘s latest book, The Unicorn Project is now available. Like with The Phoenix Project, Gene explains how DevOps principles work in practice using a fictional narrative that works really well and keeps you engaged. This time the story of Parts Unlimited is told from the position of the engineering teams on the ground facing hard choices and trying to do the right thing while facing difficult deadlines and fighting for the very survival of the business. Many of the incidents and scenarios ring true from my time as a consultant (the mention of CSV BOM’s made me shiver thinking about the time that tripped me up) but also times even here at Microsoft where we’ve let technical debt build up and had to recognize that fact and pay it back down. I would encourage everyone to read the book and buy several copies for folks on your team as you’ll quickly find yourself looking at situations at work and thinking ‘What Would Maxine Do’. The term ‘digital transformation’ can be overused and full of buzzwords – but this book does a great job of explaining what it actually means and what it feels like to go through it. Even better as it’s a narrative the audio book version works really well too and is narrated by the award winning professional actor/producer Frankie Corzo, making is a great listen on the go.

Enjoy the rest of the holiday weekend if you are in the US. Don’t forget, 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!