Alex K.

Blog author

Azure

AZ-102 my way and the new role-based certifications explained

Oh boy, what a week! It's been a hasty preparation as this exam retires tomorrow. I had to put in extra effort to get this done, and I am absolutely happy about my achievement. The funny thing - I was taking part in beta testing of this and other transition exams, but never had time to take it for real... Until the note from MS landed in my mailbox, saying that AZ-102 is about to retire soon. So,
Azure Certification DevOps

DevOps Friday: Scalability in Azure

Scalability and resiliency are important quality attributes for any Enterprise Application. When it comes to scalability, Azure has multiple options to achieve the goal. This article can be helpful not only for the beginners who want to familiarize themselves with different scalability tactics but also for the professionals looking to broaden their horizons around this Architectural aspect. I
Azure DevOps Architecture

DevOps Friday: Using SonarQube with Azure DevOps

If you never used static analyzers in your project, it’s about time. The idea is not new, although, it’s a huge asset to the development business. SonarQube is a set of static analyzers that can be used to identify areas of improvement in your code (eliminate code smells, excessive complexity, code inconsistencies, security vulnerabilities etc.). It also allows you to analyze the technical debt
Azure DevOps

DevOps Friday: Kubernetes advanced configuration - introducing Ingress

Assuming you read all my previous articles (or at least part of them) related to Kubernetes, you’re ready to move from theory to practice. Meaning, you know K8s Fundamentals, how to deal with Kubernetes secretes and even how to deploy all this stuff using Azure DevOps. Part 1: The simplest scenario Now we need to have a more production-like environment. Using IP’s to access your services is
Azure DevOps

DevOps Friday: Configure Helm for AKS

There are many ways to automate the same in the world of DevOps. One of the tools from the arsenal that could be potentially used for the matter is Helm. I’m sure you’ve heard of it already and my point here not to teach you how to run Helm charts but how to get started by configuring Helm for Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS). Before we get started, let’s agree on terminology: Helm chart (or
Azure DevOps

DevOps Friday: Enhancing Kubernetes deployment in Azure DevOps

This time I’d like to talk about enhancing existing configuration in Azure DevOps, so we can properly deploy new images to Kubernetes cluster in Azure. By default, when you create a new build pipeline, you don’t include any additional tags and check ‘Include Latest Tag’ checkbox in the task: It will work, and in the Azure Container Registry (ACR) you will receive two images, where the one will
Azure DevOps Kubernetes

DevOps Friday: Build a deployment pipeline using K8s secrets

Continuing the series about Kubernetes, this time I’d like to talk more about the applied approach using this platform. This article demonstrates even more how Dev and Ops are tied together. Everything related to K8s deployments is interesting, and this time, the issue I was facing was quite unusual. I had to deploy Identity Server image to three different environments (DEV/QA/UAT), which is
.NET Azure DevOps Kubernetes

DevOps Friday: Kubernetes Fundamentals

As people reading my topics know, I’m writing mostly about DevOps and Cloud technologies. The most widely spread technology to orchestrate containers these days is Kubernetes, and this topic is for everyone who wants to know more about its Architecture and the way it can be deployed on-premises and in the cloud. Let’s start with the concepts, i.e. the understanding what’s Kubernetes, how the
Azure Azure CLI DevOps Kubernetes GCP

Azure DevOps Server 2019 RC1 review

A couple of days ago Microsoft announced about the first RC of Azure DevOps Server 2019. The news is quite exciting, and I decided to dedicate one of the evenings to my review and dig a bit deeper using an empirical approach. The first reasonable question you may ask, what’s the point in having Azure DevOps if we still have TFS for the on-premise deployments that has roughly the same capabilities,
Azure DevOps

DevOps Friday: Migrating TFS instance to Azure DevOps

If you’re still using TFS, there are some benefits and reasons why you may need to migrate to Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), which is a cloud version of TFS with the most recent features. One of the benefits you may consider is global availability, easy access for the external users, and the other benefits are access to the most recent features and potential savings on the infrastructure and
Azure DevOps SQL Server TFS