Microsoft DevOps Tech Day

It was a good, educative workshop in a new Microsoft office steps away from Paddington train station. Several topics were presented by people from Microsoft as well as Microsoft partner RedGate. See below some notes taken there.

Microsoft:

Continuous Integration with TFS

• TFS on the cloud is $8/month if there is no subscription. Any of most popular IDEs could be connect to it.
• As part of the build, an application could be deployed on the cloud. Subscription to Azure could be identified via credentials file taken from Azure (management certificate).
• Builds could be done against the master branch or any other selected branches.
• Git doesn't support Gated Check-in (that are accepted only if submitted changes merge and build successfully) but TFS does support it.

Infrastructure 

• Infrastructure deployment could be templated, versioned and then automated.
• This could be done on Azure public or private Azure-inspired clouds.
• To instantiate a template go to: Visual Studio > Azure Resource Group > deploymentTemplate.json: parameters/variables/resources/outputs - use wizards in Visual Studio. Create Resource Group in PS1 file and use Powershell to deploy it to Azure.
• Go to Azure, click on Resource Group and see what has been deployed.
• It's possible to modify some features and then export it as a template to JSON file.
• Templates could be also deployed via Azure browser-based GUI (Azure GUI). Search there for 'Deploy Template'.
• This is an Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) - it could be versioned and auto-deployed on the need-to-do basis using continuous integration workflow.
• Check azure-quickstart-templates in GitHub. Main JSON file may come with additional one that contains parameters. Those parameters could be displayed in Azure GUI as well. 
• Check Azure QuickStart Templates on Microsoft website.
• A single template could be split into (or consist of) multiple JSON files.
• Powershell DSC could be used for a more customised deployments. As a matter of fact, it's very easy to create a customised deployment using Powershell.
• Check Powershell Gallery for more resources.
• Azure has a library of predefined images to be used for such deployments (ex SQLServer, Windows Server, etc) - this is to get started with it.
• Azure Automaton DSC could be used with Chef, Puppet, Ansible.
• See slide for Local Configuration Manager.
• Azure Visualizer could be used for inspecting instantiated infrastructure.
• Configuration could be tested with Powershell Pester Tests (which is a community project).

Continuous Delivery

• Team Services (web GUI) has management for Releases - it's a new feature.
• Release management can take artifacts from Team Services, Jenkins, Tram City, etc.
• An application release could be deployed on different environments.
• There could be particular approvers assigned to particular release deployments.
• For unsuccessful releases new Bugs could be created using the same GUI (similar to Jira).
• There is no rollback task. Instead you can use the previous release for redeployment. In this case the release could be done in manual mode.
• A successful deployment on DEV environment could expect an approval for subsequent deployment on QA environment. Approval could be done using the same GUI by a person previously authorised for that.
• Log output is visible in the GUI in real time.
• See Xamarin Test Cloud and HockeyApp for beta distribution.
• Release Management (from above) could use a task for testing an application on Xamarin Cloud.

RedGate: 

DevOps for databases

• You can create a database project in VisualStudio.
• How to deal with db changes - schema updates, drifts, etc.

Infrastructure and Application Monitoring

• Infrastructure Insights:
• Create a new dashboard in Azure.
• Pin to the dashboard required tiles.
• Settings for each tile could be configured.
• Once dashboard is ready it could be shared with other people.
• Application Insights:
• Telemetry sources: traces, events, etc.
• Log Analytics (OMS):
• (Microsoft Operation Management Suite)
• Another customizable dashboard.
• Both for Windows and Linux.
• It's solution based. See Solution Gallery.
• Try OMS at www.mms.microsoft.com
• Feedback and ideas windowsserver.uservoice.com