How I built a dashboard in Azure Portal to track Gitflow feature branches
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Nov 4, 2018
GitFlow is one of the popular branching strategies if you using Git version control. Most of the teams I have worked with generally are very satisfied using it. With fixed branch names, pull requests for code reviews, teams find that it fits very nicely with their day to day workflow. In this blog post, you will see how I built a useful dashboard in Azure portal to track whether teams following Gitflow strategy (especially their topic branches) as they should, giving teams an easy way to track stale branches and keeping their branches neat and tidy.
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Installing ASP.NET Core Site Extension for Azure App Service Using ARM template
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Oct 25, 2018
Site Extensions add functionality to your Azure App Service and they can be added to various other resources like Azure Function app. You can easily browse and add these site extensions from the portal by going to “Extensions” tab from your “App Service”. However, when you are automating everything with Azure DevOps, you will want to do everything via as part of resource provisioning. Using ARM templates this can be automated easily. In this small blog post we will see how to install ASP.NET Core Extensions for you Azure App Services. The ASP.NET Core extension provides additional functionality for ASP.NET Core on Azure Websites such as enabling Azure logging.
How to enable Azure Hybrid License to save 40% on your Windows License Cost...
Tarun Arora
on Oct 18, 2018
Are you using Windows virtual machines in Azure? Do you have any Windows Server Datacenter virtual machines on-premise? If the answer to the first two questions is a yes, readon as you could be eligible to save 40% in compute cost for your virtual machines in Azure! Enterprises starting their digital transformation journey find it hard to justify the ramp up in the cost during the swing period of migrating services to cloud. The Azure Hybrid Benefit helps you get more value from your Windows Server licenses and save up to 40 percent on virtual machines.
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Provisioning Sitecore environment with Azure DevOps on Azure PaaS
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Oct 15, 2018
The Sitecore Experience Platform (XP) is a popular and powerful Content Management System (CMS) used by many organizations. The digital experience software comes in various configurations based on the enterprises requirements. In this post we will see how we can provision a brand new Sitecore environment on Azure PaaS using Azure Pipelines.
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Monitor unhandled exceptions in your VS Marketplace task extensions using Sentry
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Oct 9, 2018
If you develop build tasks for Azure DevOps, I am sure one thing you miss is the ability to get a detailed error report when your task fails due to exceptions. Your tasks in a regular CI/CD pipeline would just fail due to various reasons - wrong inputs provided to the task, your logic not handling a customer-specific scenario or some really unknown reasons. So once you released your extension to the marketplace you only have to rely on your users to report any issues in your build/release tasks. In this post, we will see how we can use Sentry to report errors in our extensions.
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Continuous build and deployment of Visual Studio extensions using Azure Pipelines
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Sep 27, 2018
Visual Studio extensions are great to extend and add additional features/enhancements to the Visual Studio IDE. Unfortunately, until now there was no better way to implement a proper CI/CD for your Visual Studio extensions. In this blog post I will show you how you can setup continuous build and deployment for your Visual Studio extensions.
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Working with Azure Key vault using NodeJS
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Sep 18, 2018
This is quick post on how to work with Azure Key vault using npm package for Azure Key vault. In this post we will see how we can authenticate to Azure Key vault using azure service principal. We will then write secrets to the keyvault and add few tags to the secret.
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GitLab Integration for Azure Pipelines extension
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Sep 12, 2018
This is an extension for Azure DevOps, which integrates GitLab with Azure Pipelines. With this extension, you will be able to download the sources from a GitLab repository (using clone command) and use downloaded sources in Azure Pipelines. The extension comes as an artifact source in Release Management and also has a Build task to download sources in your build pipeline.
Check for security issues in your ARM templates using AzSk
Utkarsh Shigihalli
on Aug 15, 2018
Secure DevOps Kit for Azure (AzSK) is packed with great set of tools, scripts and tasks to help you scan your Azure resources for security issues. At my client we have scheduled this as part of CICD to scan resources and generate report. The extension also includes a task to scan your ARM templates for security issues - The benefit is that you can STOP security issues even before they get deployed to Azure, ensuring you always do secured resource deployment. In this post we will see how easy it is to include this task in your CICD pipeline to scan for issues in your ARM templates.
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Why enable accelerated Networking in Azure VMs? Perf Test Results...
Tarun Arora
on Aug 11, 2018
Accelerated Networking is a feature that significantly enhances the performance you get out of a virtual machine. The feature is free but is only available in selective VM sizes. The feature is disabled by default and isn’t available to enable via the Azure Portal so doesn’t get a lot of attention either. If you are a nerd like me, you’ll freak out with the difference in the virtual machine performance with accelerated networking enabled. You gotta see it to believe it!… So, in this blog post i’ll walk through the difference in throughput and latency with and without accelerated networking….
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