Building an Azure DevOps-based ARM CI/CD for Azure Cloud

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all!

Over the past few years, I’ve worked to build up a highly scalable and secure terraform CI/CD platform based on Azure DevOps for many internal teams. We now maintain 150+ terraform pipelines across both AWS and Azure (I keep hearing teams might require GCP, but none have demanded it yet!), with ~50 runs per day. That amounts to some serious computer, and a great deal of investment into our processes and technologies to keep the whole stack from falling over. I’ve written extensively about how and what, if you’re interested in reading it — just check out my profile.

And now that it all works, we’re looking to the future. What other languages do we want to support? Terraform works well, but there are some weaknesses it has which we’re able to overcome with other languages.

#devops #azure #azure devops

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Multi-cloud Spending: 8 Tips To Lower Cost

A multi-cloud approach is nothing but leveraging two or more cloud platforms for meeting the various business requirements of an enterprise. The multi-cloud IT environment incorporates different clouds from multiple vendors and negates the dependence on a single public cloud service provider. Thus enterprises can choose specific services from multiple public clouds and reap the benefits of each.

Given its affordability and agility, most enterprises opt for a multi-cloud approach in cloud computing now. A 2018 survey on the public cloud services market points out that 81% of the respondents use services from two or more providers. Subsequently, the cloud computing services market has reported incredible growth in recent times. The worldwide public cloud services market is all set to reach $500 billion in the next four years, according to IDC.

By choosing multi-cloud solutions strategically, enterprises can optimize the benefits of cloud computing and aim for some key competitive advantages. They can avoid the lengthy and cumbersome processes involved in buying, installing and testing high-priced systems. The IaaS and PaaS solutions have become a windfall for the enterprise’s budget as it does not incur huge up-front capital expenditure.

However, cost optimization is still a challenge while facilitating a multi-cloud environment and a large number of enterprises end up overpaying with or without realizing it. The below-mentioned tips would help you ensure the money is spent wisely on cloud computing services.

• Deactivate underused or unattached resources

Most organizations tend to get wrong with simple things which turn out to be the root cause for needless spending and resource wastage. The first step to cost optimization in your cloud strategy is to identify underutilized resources that you have been paying for.

Enterprises often continue to pay for resources that have been purchased earlier but are no longer useful. Identifying such unused and unattached resources and deactivating it on a regular basis brings you one step closer to cost optimization. If needed, you can deploy automated cloud management tools that are largely helpful in providing the analytics needed to optimize the cloud spending and cut costs on an ongoing basis.

• Figure out idle instances

Another key cost optimization strategy is to identify the idle computing instances and consolidate them into fewer instances. An idle computing instance may require a CPU utilization level of 1-5%, but you may be billed by the service provider for 100% for the same instance.

Every enterprise will have such non-production instances that constitute unnecessary storage space and lead to overpaying. Re-evaluating your resource allocations regularly and removing unnecessary storage may help you save money significantly. Resource allocation is not only a matter of CPU and memory but also it is linked to the storage, network, and various other factors.

• Deploy monitoring mechanisms

The key to efficient cost reduction in cloud computing technology lies in proactive monitoring. A comprehensive view of the cloud usage helps enterprises to monitor and minimize unnecessary spending. You can make use of various mechanisms for monitoring computing demand.

For instance, you can use a heatmap to understand the highs and lows in computing visually. This heat map indicates the start and stop times which in turn lead to reduced costs. You can also deploy automated tools that help organizations to schedule instances to start and stop. By following a heatmap, you can understand whether it is safe to shut down servers on holidays or weekends.

#cloud computing services #all #hybrid cloud #cloud #multi-cloud strategy #cloud spend #multi-cloud spending #multi cloud adoption #why multi cloud #multi cloud trends #multi cloud companies #multi cloud research #multi cloud market

Building an Azure DevOps-based ARM CI/CD for Azure Cloud

This blog series focuses on presenting complex DevOps projects as simple and approachable via plain language and lots of pictures. You can do it!

Hey all!

Over the past few years, I’ve worked to build up a highly scalable and secure terraform CI/CD platform based on Azure DevOps for many internal teams. We now maintain 150+ terraform pipelines across both AWS and Azure (I keep hearing teams might require GCP, but none have demanded it yet!), with ~50 runs per day. That amounts to some serious computer, and a great deal of investment into our processes and technologies to keep the whole stack from falling over. I’ve written extensively about how and what, if you’re interested in reading it — just check out my profile.

And now that it all works, we’re looking to the future. What other languages do we want to support? Terraform works well, but there are some weaknesses it has which we’re able to overcome with other languages.

#devops #azure #azure devops

Serverless CI/CD on the AWS Cloud

CI/CD pipelines have long played a major role in speeding up the development and deployment of cloud-native apps. Cloud services like AWS lend themselves to more agile deployment through the services they offer as well as approaches such as Infrastructure as Code. There is no shortage of tools to help you manage your CI/CD pipeline as well.

While the majority of development teams have streamlined their pipelines to take full advantage of cloud-native features, there is still so much that can be done to refine CI/CD even further. The entire pipeline can now be built as code and managed either via Git as a single source of truth or by using visual tools to help guide the process.

The entire process can be fully automated. Even better, it can be made serverless, which allows the CI/CD pipeline to operate with immense efficiency. Git branches can even be utilized as a base for multiple pipelines. Thanks to the three tools from Amazon; AWS CodeCommit, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy, serverless CI/CD on the AWS cloud is now easy to set up.

#aws #aws codebuild #aws codecommit #aws codedeploy #cd #cd pipeline #ci #ci/cd processes #ci/cd workflow #serverless

How to Extend your DevOps Strategy For Success in the Cloud?

DevOps and Cloud computing are joined at the hip, now that fact is well appreciated by the organizations that engaged in SaaS cloud and developed applications in the Cloud. During the COVID crisis period, most of the organizations have started using cloud computing services and implementing a cloud-first strategy to establish their remote operations. Similarly, the extended DevOps strategy will make the development process more agile with automated test cases.

According to the survey in EMEA, IT decision-makers have observed a 129%* improvement in the overall software development process when performing DevOps on the Cloud. This success result was just 81% when practicing only DevOps and 67%* when leveraging Cloud without DevOps. Not only that, but the practice has also made the software predictability better, improve the customer experience as well as speed up software delivery 2.6* times faster.

3 Core Principle to fit DevOps Strategy

If you consider implementing DevOps in concert with the Cloud, then the

below core principle will guide you to utilize the strategy.

• It is indispensable to follow a continuous process, including all stages from Dev to deploy with the help of auto-provisioning resources of the target platform.
• The team always keeps an eye on major and minor application changes that can typically appear within a few hours of development to operation. However, the support of unlimited resource provisioning is needed at the stage of deployment.
• Cloud or hybrid configuration can associate this process, but you must confirm that configuration should support multiple cloud brands like Microsoft, AWS, Google, any public and private cloud models.

Guide to Remold Business with DevOps and Cloud

Companies are now re-inventing themselves to become better at sensing the next big thing their customers need and finding ways with the Cloud based DevOps to get ahead of the competition.

#devops #devops-principles #azure-devops #devops-transformation #good-company #devops-tools #devops-top-story #devops-infrastructure

CI/CD Tutorial for Xamarin Android with Google Play Publishing in Azure DevOps | Part 2.

If you haven’t seen part 1, click here, and start build up your CI/CD pipeline now.

Part 2 Contains:

• Configuring build with creating signed APK, and making artifacts from it
• Setting up branch policy to master

Configure some magic

Let’s go back to Pipelines. Edit your previously created pipeline by clicking the three dot on the pipelines row.

Edit the previously created pipeline

CI is based on cloud machines hosted somewhere over the world. This computers called as agents. They are used to follow your instructions, defined in the yml file. The base Xamarin.Android yml is only to build your code. But we will make some additional steps in order to create a signed APK of every build. Follow up, to complete this setup.

Recommended branching strategy for this is to keep a development branch, and pull request your feature branches to it, and finally pull request the development branch to the master, and keep your master is always at your production version. The figure below shows visually this method. Source: https://dzone.com/articles/feature-branching-using-feature-flags-1

Create a signed APK or bundle from every build

First, set up some variables for this pipeline. You will find a Variables button on the right top of the tab. Click on it.

#xamarin #azure #azure devops #ci #ci/cd #pipeline #pipelines #xamarin