Colin's ALM Corner

Custom CodeQL

CodeQL is a powerful code scanning tool that can be integrated into your pipelines. In this post I show you some basics, as well as how to develop and integrate custom queries into your pipelines.

Actions

Deployment with GitHub Actions: The Bad and the Ugly

GitHub Actions can be used for Continuous Deployment (CD) - but there are some rough edges. In this post I take you through a deep dive and lift the kimono on Actions.

DevOps

DevOps Benefits of Limiting WIP

Generally limiting WIP is discussed in the context of work item tracking - but too much WIP has detrimental effects on branching, testing, architecture and technical debt too!

Azure Pipelines for Private AKS Clusters

Creating private AKS clusters is a good step in hardening your Azure Kubernetes clusters. In this post I walk through the steps you'll need to follow to enable deployment to private AKS clusters.

DevOps

Little's Law Doesn't Work

I remember being mesmerized watching one of my favorite humans, Steven Borg, talk about flow in knowledge work. Watching him train teams on queues and lean practices was amazing. Of course, Steve pointed me to The Principles of Product Development Flow by Donald G.

Automation

az devops cli like a boss

One of the best features of Azure DevOps is the extensive API. However, while having a REST API is great, interacting with a service at HTTP level can be frustrating. In this post, I examine the az devops cli using 10 practical examples.

GitHub

Hosting Code On Premises: GitHub Enterprise with Azure DevOps

Do you want to be on the latest DevOps platforms, but are required to keep source code on premises? In this post I talk about considerations for hosting GitHub Enterprise and Azure DevOps Server on premises.

Reporting

Azure DevOps Work Item Hierarchy Reports in PowerBI

My colleague Josh Johanning and I were working with a team that is using Azure DevOps to track work. Their team lead was opening Excel and pulling in Work Item

Azure

LetsEncrypt Auto-Renewal For Azure Web Apps for Linux

In this post I show how I achieved automated LetsEncrypt cert registration and renewal for Azure Web Apps for Linux using nginx and CertBot.

GitHub

ChatOps with GitHub Actions and Azure Web Apps

In this video, I show you how to use GitHub Actions to implement ChatOps with Azure Web Apps.

Build

Azure Pipeline Parameters

In a previous post, I did a deep dive into Azure Pipeline variables. That post turned out to be longer than I anticipated, so I left off the topic of parameters until this post. Type: AnyIf we look at the YML schema for variables

Testing

Executing JMeter Tests in an Azure Pipeline

Microsoft have deprecated Load Testing in Visual Studio. Along with this, they have also deprecated the cloud load testing capability in Azure/Azure DevOps. On the official alternatives document, several alternative load testing tools and platforms are mentioned, including JMeter. What is not clear

Build

Azure Pipeline Variables

I am a big fan of Azure Pipelines. Yes it’s YAML, but once you get over that it’s a fantastic way to represent pipelines as code. It would be tough to achieve any sort of sophistication in your pipelines without variables. There

Build

Azure DevOps Build and Test Reports using OData and REST in PowerBI

I have been playing with the Azure DevOps OData service recently to start creating some reports. Most of my fiddling has been with the Work Item and Work Item Board Snaphot entities, but I recently read a great post focused more on Build metrics

Source Control

Enterprise GitHub

Since Microsoft acquired GitHub, and the anti-Microsoft folks had calmed down, there have been a number of interesting developments in the GitHub ecosystem. If you’ve ever read one of my blogs or attended any events that I’ve spoken at, you’ll know

Docker

Container DevOps: Beyond Build (Part 4) - Telemetry with Prometheus

Series: Part 1: IntroPart 2: Traefik BasicsPart 3: Canary TestingPart 4: Telemetry with Prometheus (this post)Part 5: Prometheus OperatorIn my previous post in this series I wrote about how I used Traefik to do traffic shifting and canary testing. I asserted that without

Docker

Container DevOps: Beyond Build (Part 3) - Canary Testing

Series: Part 1: IntroPart 2: Traefik BasicsPart 3: Canary Testing (this post)Part 4: Telemetry with PrometheusPart 5: Prometheus OperatorIn my previous post I compared Istio, Linkerd and Traefik and motivated why I preferred Traefik for Container DevOps. I showed how I was able

Docker

Container DevOps Beyond Build: Part 2 - Traefik

Series: Part 1: IntroPart 2: Traefik (this post)Part 3: Canary TestingPart 4: Telemetry with PrometheusPart 5: Prometheus OperatorIn Part 1 of this series, I outlined some of my goals and some of the thinking around what I think Container DevOps is - it's

Docker

Container DevOps: Beyond Build (Part 1)

Series: Part 1: Intro (this post)Part 2: Traefik BasicsPart 3: Canary TestingPart 4: Telemetry with PrometheusPart 5: Prometheus OperatorI've written before that I think that containers - and Kubernetes (k8s) - are the way of the future. I was fortunate enough to attend

Docker

Container DevOps: Beyond Build (Part 5) - Prometheus Operator

Series: Part 1: IntroPart 2: Traefik BasicsPart 3: Canary TestingPart 4: Telemetry with PrometheusPart 5: Prometheus Operator (this post)In part 4 of this series I showed how I created a metrics endpoint using Prometheus in my .NET Core application. While not perfect for

DevOps

Lessons about DevOps from 3D Printing

It's no surprise that I'm passionate about DevOps. I think that has to do with my personality - my top five StrengthsFinder strengths are Strategic, Ideation, Learner, Activator, Achiever. I love the combination of people and tools that DevOps brings together. Being deeply technical

Docker

.NET Core Multi-Stage Dockerfile with Test and Code Coverage in Azure Pipelines

I read a great blogpost recently by my friend and fellow MVP Jakob Ehn. In this post he outlines how he created a multi-stage Dockerfile to run .NET Core tests. I've always been on the fence about running tests during a container build -

Source Control

Modernizing Source Control - Migrating to Git

I remember when I first learned about Git circa 2012. I was skeptical - you can change history? What kind of source control system let you change history? However, it seemed to have huge momentum and so I started learning how to use it.

Release Management

Implement an Azure DevOps Release Gate to ServiceNow

I'm currently doing some work with a customer that is integrating between ServiceNow and Azure DevOps (the artist formerly known as VSTS). I quickly spun up a development ServiceNow instance to play around a bit. One of the use-cases I could foresee was a

Development

Pimp Your Consoles on Windows

I spend a fair amount of time in consoles - specifically PowerShell and Bash (Windows Subsystem for Linux) on my Windows 10 machine. I also work with Git - a lot. So having a cool console that is Git aware is a must. I