Developer Support

Advocacy and Innovation

Beyond “Lift-and-Shift”: Application Modernization with Microsoft Azure

The "lift-and-shift" approach with Azure IaaS can only deliver on small measure of the promise of agility and innovation in the Cloud when compared to modernized application (i.e., Cloud-optimized). Modernizing application with Azure PaaS, on the other hand, can deliver on the promise of agility and innovation to a great extent. It reduces the time required to manage the application and the time required to deploy a new release, and optimizes the speed to market.

Tracking Cross-team Projects in Azure DevOps Boards

If part of this transition requires that aspects from the legacy process be kept, it’s a great opportunity to demonstrate that through the use of agile process and agile tools, we can have an even better control of the value (beyond just software) that the development team is creating for the company.

Pragmatic TDD

I have been working on a small project in my free time in which I’m the only developer. When I started the project, I wanted to write the entire application in a test driven, test first, manner. I wrote my failing test, then made the test pass and as I saw opportunities to refactor, I took the time to reduce complexity, separate concerns and reorganize as needed. I was in a red-green-refactor rhythm and it was enjoyable to see the test count go up and my code coverage for tests at 100%… but then reality set in.

DevOps and Waste

One of the great things we’ve learned from applying Lean to software development and operations is the notion of eliminating waste is our processes. In this article I’ll provide some background on why this is important and how to find and eliminate waste in your daily activities.

DevOps and Business Strategy

When I engage with customers I often work with developers, business analysts, managers, Operations, etc. and the discussions are invariably about tools whether they are Microsoft’s or Open Source tools. These are great topics and open up conversations around many other topics. However, most folks aren’t really talking about the reason we are trying to use these tools. All too often the tools become the shiny objects in the room which divert us from even more important topics.

DevOps Stories – An Interview with Brian Blackman of Microsoft Premier

App Dev Manager Dave Harrison talks with Brian Blackman, a Senior Consultant for Microsoft Premier. As an Azure development and DevOps consultant, he works with Independent Software Vendors (ISV), Enterprises, and Partners where his specialty is DevOps. Brian’s focus is assisting customers in establishing a vision for DevOps, assessing where they currently stand, and then working with them to develop a roadmap to attain their vision. MCTP, MCSD-C++, CSM, CSP, SAFe Agilist.

Part II – Kubernetes DevOps : Introduction to Helm

This is the second post in a multi-part blog series on Kubernetes DevOps using Azure. I am co-authoring this series with the help of my colleague at Microsoft, Daniel Selman. We recently worked on K8s project together and thought to share out learnings. In the last post, you get to know the application that going to be deployed in the Kubernetes cluster. In this post, you will learn about the tool called “Helm”.