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Azure DevOps Pipelines: If Expressions and Conditions
John Folberth continues his series on Azure DevOps Pipelines by taking a deep dive into If Expressions and Conditions. At this stage in the series we’ve talked about tasks, jobs, stages, how to template them, and how to leverage environments in variables. This post will attempt to cover some basics around using if and conditions in your YAML Pipelines. If Expressions If expressions are simple and easy enough in YAML pipelines, they are a powerful tool. In my experience I have leveraged if expressions to: The key to unlocking their power is the understanding that an if expression will e...
Developer Support and MSDN/Visual Studio Subscription Benefits
Visual Studio provides valuable subscription benefits for building software and creating test environments. This includes access to installation media, developer tools, online training, Azure/Office 365 subscriptions, and even basic support. Since most development teams have access to MSDN/Visual Studio Subscriptions, businesses will frequently ask: Why would we need to add Developer Support as part of a Unified Support Contract? It is important to understand the limited scope of support benefits included with a Visual Studio Subscription. Some VS subscriptions include incident support made available to...
Azure DevOps Pipelines: Tasks, Jobs, Stages and more!
John Folberth recently contributed a series of Azure DevOps posts in our Tech Community covering a range of Pipeline topics, including Template Tasks, Jobs, Environments, Variables, Jobs, and Stages. There is a lot of great information, so be sure to check these out. Azure DevOps Pipelines: Tasks, Jobs, Stages When starting in Azure DevOps Pipelines one can immediately become inundated with terminology that may seem foreign or question what pipeline structure will lead to the most flexibility and streamlining of their build/deployment process. This post will focus on the hierarchy of Tasks->Jobs-Sta...
Deploying Kubernetes Cluster on Azure VMs using kubeadm, CNI and containerd
Cenk Caglar and Toros Gökkurt walk through how to deploy Kubernetes clusters on Azure VMs using kubeadm, CNI and containerd. Although managed Kubernetes clusters are great, ready for production, and secure, they hide most of the administrative operations. I remember the days I was working with Kubernetes the hard way repository to deploy on Azure Virtual Machines and I was thinking that there should be an easier way to deploy your cluster. One of the well-known methods is kubeadm which is announced at 2018. Since then, it is part of the Kubernetes and has its own GitHub page. When we were studying for K...
Azure DevOps – Leveraging Pipeline Decorators for Custom Process Automation
In this post, Jin Lee explores how Azure DevOps Pipeline Decorators can bridge the gap in a cloud environment with a customer's existing security processes on their on-premises IIS server. Background In the recent pandemic, health institutions all across the world have been pushed to their limits on about every facet. Through this, many such institutions have begun to reprioritize their modernization efforts around their cloud infrastructure to support increasing demands and hedge against uncertainty. As institutions are migrating their existing workloads into the cloud, a common challenge they are faced ...
Introduce RBAC in PostgreSQL Flexible Server
Pete Tian spotlights RBAC for PostgreSQL Flexible Server. As more enterprises modernize identity management by using RBAC and simply authentication with Single Sign-On, the efforts of maintaining separate sets of username/password for every legacy database instance is still excessive operational overhead that is considerable for IT admins. Even worse, once the databases migrated to public cloud with public IP exposure, the legacy identity management system became a security nightmare. The voice demanding integration of RBAC / RDBMS access management has been crescendo in recent years, and finally a solu...
Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL w/ React QuickStart
John Folberth and Daniel Kim dive into Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL and React with this overview and QuickStart. At Ignite 2022, Microsoft made an announcement for PostgreSQL in Azure CosmosDB! What is Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL? Azure Cosmos DB - is a fast, distributed NoSQL database. Scalable with 99.999% availability! (Get started) PostgreSQL - Here are some reasons why you might want to use PostgreSQL – Azure Cosmos DB for PostgreSQL has combined these two technologies and extended with Citus extension to bring distributed tables for PostgreSQL. Combining Azure Cosmos DB...
Tracking Azure History with Azure Resource Graph
John Folberth explores how Azure Resource Graph can help you can track environmental changes that span multiple subscriptions and resources. When administrating an Azure environment, or any environment really, one will most likely find a way to track changes that were introduced. There are a number of ways to do this. Within Azure can query the Subscription or Resource Group Deployment, the downside though is this approach is limited to just the scope you are querying on. What if this is a larger organization with multiple subscriptions? You could also rely on a well-established CI/CD pipeline, a third-par...
Deep Dive into Social Media Analytics
Daniel Kim shares a two-part series exploring how to use Social Media, Azure Synapse & Power BI to make Insightful decisions with Social Media Analytics. Imagine you are a product developer for a healthcare company who wants to find trending topics around your recently developed product - or - you are a researcher for a company who wants to search around what is trending on the market to come up with new innovative products. You’ll first need to find a way to scrape different news sites and search popular social media platform, like Twitter, to find trending topics. Also imagine, after all the sc...