I've written before about Selenium testing (Parallel Testing in a Selenium Grid with VSTS and Running Selenium Tests in Docker using VSTS and Release Management). The problem with these solutions, however, is that you need a VM! However, I was setting up a demo last week and decided to try to solve this challenge using Azure Container Instances (ACI), and I have a neat solution. So why ACI? Why ...

I've done a fair amount of ARM template authoring. It's not as bad as XML, but the JSON can get laborious. A number of my colleagues use Terraform templates and I was recently on a project that was using these templates. I quickly did a couple PluralSight Terraform classes to get up to speed and then started hacking away. In this post I'll jot down a couple thoughts about how we structure ...

Releases almost always require some kind of credentials - from service credentials to database usernames and passwords. There are a number of ways to manage credentials in VSTS release management. In this post I'll look at a couple of common techniques. For brevity, I'm going to refer to secrets as a proxy for secrets and credentials. Don't Store Secrets in Source Control One bad practice you want ...

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a cloud platform. That means it's publicly accessible from anywhere - at least, by default. However, Enterprises that are moving from TFS to VSTS may want to ensure that VSTS is only accessed from a corporate network or some white-list of IPs. To enable conditional access to VSTS, you'll have to have an Azure Active Directory (AAD) backed VSTS account. The ...