Collaboration is a crucial element in software development; having the right collaboration tools can make a difference and boost the entire team’s productivity. Microsoft introduced its Application Lifecycle Management product with Team Foundation Server (aka TFS) on March 16th, 2006. This software had to be installed on a server within your network and had a user-based license. To reduce the complexity of setting up and maintaining the server, Microsoft released Visual Studio Online–an Azure-based, server-hosted version of TFS. Microsoft manages and administers the servers as well as taking care of backups. …
In today’s article, I guide you through your Azure DevOps setup to perform automated load tests using k6. Before we begin, I want to take a minute to explain what load tests are and why they are essential.
What is a load test?
There are many different types of testing in software development. For example, some tests check that different models of an application work together as expected (integration testing), some focus on the business requirements of an application by verifying the output of action without considering the intermediate state (functional testing), and others perform different types of testing. Load testing is a type of…
During the past few days, I received several emails from people asking why their CI/CD pipelines started randomly receiving errors like the following:
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 a previous article, you were guided through the benefits of running an Azure App Service application in multiple regions. Now that the cloud part of your application is ready, we can move forward setting up Azure DevOps.
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…
Ivan Porta
Microsoft Certified DevOps Engineer Expert | MCT | Public Speaker | Customer Engineer @Microsoft
