A previous article guided you through setting up your repository. You did this by creating multiple branches that reflect the GitFlow model and protecting those branch use policies. Then, I gave you an overview of how pull requests work. This article — the final installment in the Azure series — will show you how to implement Azure’s continuous testing, integration, and deployment mechanisms.
In my previous article, we created an Azure SQL database resource, replicated it in Europe, and set it up to synchronize with Contoso’s primary database in Montana. In today’s article, I will move forward and creating an App Service resource, replicating it in North Europe, and setting up an Azure Front Door resource that will load-balance and forward the HTTP requests to the closest App Service.
In my previous article, we created a proposal based on the company’s overview, goals, and technology, then highlighting the benefits of an architecture base on Azure resources and giving an overview of its flow. In today’s article, I am going to start guiding you by implementing the proposed architecture by creating an Azure SQL database resource in our main company’s database in Montana, replicating it in Europe, and then synchronizing it with the On-Premises database.
This month, I want to do something different. Typically, I discuss standalone topics related to an overall theme without really connecting each of them. But this time, I will guide you through a real-life scenario of how Azure can help your organization; starting with the analysis of the deliverable, through to their implementation.
Company overview
Contoso is a privately-owned construction company that does business in Montana and North Dakota. Contoso’s business model focuses on on-site developments, municipal work, asphalt and concrete construction, and structural pier foundations. Their customer base includes real-estate developers and government agencies.
Business Environment and Goals
Even though the United States’ economy is…
By default, Azure Boards don’t provide an option to show the progress of the scheduled work items of a team by sprint in a calendar view. However, you can add this capability by installing the Delivery Plans official extension.
What is a delivery plan?
A delivery plan provides an overall view of different teams’ work schedules spread across sprints. Doing so enables transparency across teams and helps management make decisions based on dependencies between tram’s deliverables and schedule slippage.
Install the extension
These instructions will show you how to install the Delivery Plans extension that we are going to use for this tutorial:
- Sign in to your Azure…
This article will talk about YAML templates. By using these templates, you can make your code reusable and simplify sharing code across multiple pipelines.
If you are new to CI/CD, you might be familiar with blocks of code repeated multiple times in a single pipeline or deploying applications in various environments. The problem with code duplication is that block refactors must be propagated to each duplicate. Because of this, both the chance of human error and the time required to develop the pipeline increase linearly as the number of duplicates.
Using YAML templates, you can define reusable content, logic, and…
This article will guide you through the implementation of CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps. This will enable you to deploy your local report to your Power BI service automatically. To show you how it works, I will use an extension called Power BI Actions, available for free on the Visual Studio marketplace.
Azure Portal
Create a new app registration
To access Power BI service content and APIs, you need to register an application that will authenticate against your Azure Active Directory. To do so, follow these instructions:
- Sign in to the Azure portal.
- Select Azure Active Directory and then App Registration.
- Click the New Registration.
Microsoft recently announced support for the Azure DevOps service tag. In this article, I will explain how the Azure DevOps service tags work and why they are helpful.
What is a service tag?
A service tag represents a group of IP address prefixes from a given Azure service. Microsoft manages the address prefixes encompassed by the service tag. Microsoft automatically updates the service tag as addresses change, minimizing the complexity of frequent updates to network security rules. This mechanism simplifies the maintenance and management of network access control on network security groups, Azure firewalls, and on-premises firewalls.
Azure service tags and DevOps
Azure DevOps is a cloud service distributed in…
Microsoft Teams’ daily users are skyrocketing. From April 2020 to October 2020, their numbers rose more than 50 percent from 75 million to 115 million.
Suppose your company decides to adopt this software for daily internal or external communications. In that case, you might face the manual construction of public/private teams and channels, assign Office 365 users to them, and so on. This procedure might become very time consuming as the complexity of your company increases.
To solve this problem, I have created a script that takes care of all of this for you by automating the entire process. …
Ivan Porta
Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer Expert | MCT | .NET Developer | Public Speaker
