Category

DevOps

Continuous Integration, DevOps, Docker

CosmosDB linux container for your CI builds

If you have been following Microsoft Build 2021, you may have seen the news that the CosmosDB linux container is now out. This is great news for the ones who finally want to test on a *nix environment. As of this post, the CosmosDB linux container is in preview. As stated in the documentation, there are some limitations: Today, I will show you how you can automate the CosmosDB container for your CI builds, in particular Azure DevOps, running on Linux and Windows machines. If you plan to use the container on a machine running Windows, but using Docker Linux container mode, you will run into some Windows limitations while automating the process. Read more about that below. Using the…

Read more
June 8, 2021 | by Dominique St-Amand | 1 Comment
DevOps, VMware

Creating an Azure DevOps hosted agent image for VMware

I’ve recently came across a news from Microsoft stating that they will remove the free grant for hosted agents: I love hosted agents as they include all the tools, I can possibly use, for me to build any possible software. For new comers, who want to have an Azure DevOps organization that can leverage hosted agents, which include concurrent pipelines, having this limitation is a bummer. Going through the channels to get that feature unblocked, can be overwhelming and a lot of people move on. This leaves you 1 solution if you don’t want to go through all of that: hosting the agents (at least 2, because concurrency means 2 agents/workers!) yourself. Thankfully, the hosted agent process for building the…

Read more
April 16, 2021 | by Dominique St-Amand | 3 Comments
Azure, C#, DevOps, Docker

Integration tests using Azure Storage emulator and .NET Core in Azure DevOps

I had a friend contact me about a situation that he was trying to do and I was about to have the same situation myself so I decided to tackle it. That situation is that we both need to test our code, but our code is dependent on Azure Storage. As you know, you can emulate Azure Storage on Windows using the (now deprecated) Azure Storage Emulator, or using Azurite. Since my code is built and tested on linux, I decided on using Azurite. Azurite v3 runs in a container. Azurite v2 runs using node.js but the container is not officially available. You need to build the image yourself. Azurite v2 is necessary if you need to have access to…

Read more
January 8, 2021 | by Dominique St-Amand | 1 Comment
Azure, DevOps

Automating your OpenAPI updates to API Management through your CI/CD pipeline

Microservices are the trend in today’s day and age, even if you may have read that some are going back the monolith way. Most microservices architectures are built to communicate through REST: each service is an API that shares a contract for other services to consume. Since your product ecosystem will (hopefully) evolve over time, your contracts are to evolve overtime as well. If you decided to consolidate your contracts consumption into one point of entry (using the API Gateway pattern), how do you actually make sure that those contracts are properly updated in your gateway for each of your environments up to your production environment? In this post, I will show you how you can update your APIs contracts…

Read more
May 10, 2020 | by Dominique St-Amand | 4 Comments
Azure, DevOps

Migrating your applications to Azure using Virtual Machine Scale Sets, Packer and Virtual Machine extensions – Part 3

This is a continuation of the previous post about migrating your not ready cloud application to the Azure cloud. The last post discussed about creating a managed image to be able to be used by a virtual machine scale set for provisioning. What will we do in this series I decided to do a series of posts about this topic as it touches a variety of aspects. I will use a concrete example that may or may not have happened to you and I plan to cover Building a managed image from an Ubuntu image as base, and setting up a web server (Tomcat for instance) to host an application Creating a Virtual Machine Scale Set using ARM templates Adding…

Read more
February 18, 2020 | by Dominique St-Amand | 1 Comment
Continuous Integration, DevOps

Using WebDeploy in a CI/CD pipeline with powershell

It’s cool to play around with new Tech and new stuff but sometimes you have to come back to the basics that have been working for years. I’ve been setting up the CI/CD pipeline at my work place for my team and one task consisted of deploying the generated code documentation with DocFX, to our development web server hosted through IIS. Since I had custom logic I wanted to execute, I couldn’t use the built in WebDeploy task that was provided to me. So when you are doing DevOps, PowerShell becomes your best friend. For those who are struggling to install WebDeploy in IIS (8+), follow the guide Inigo Montoya put together. You should also configure a site using a Non-Administrative user…

Read more
January 20, 2019 | by Dominique St-Amand | 1 Comment