Three Key Takeaways From Our DevOps Workshops

We love to meet up regularly with our customers, and our February UK-wide DevOps workshops gave us the opportunity to meet many who are taking the steps towards modernising their application development and embracing software deployments that need scalability.

The first session of the day was presented by Black Marble, the second session presented by Microsoft. In the north, Black Marble’s Rik Hepworth presented ““Living the dream. Real world DevOps with Azure and VSTS” and Microsoft Cloud Architect John Duckmanton presented “DevOps with Microsoft and Azure”. In the south, the presenters were Riccardo Viglianisi from Black Marble and Ben Coleman from Microsoft.

Microsoft’s Ben Coleman delivering his session.

My three takeaways from the workshops are:

1. VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) is the developer’s friend

VSTS supports DevOp practices to provide Agile CI and CD of applications in multiple languages. It also handles much of the complexity associated with deployment. Templates for the various infrastructure components are provided to stand-up the environment needed for your application. Integration is a big part of VSTS which acts as host for the many build tools and components you need for your project. There are many more aspects to VSTS though, including the ability to run both load and performance tests in the cloud, manage code, and the ability to have unlimited private Git repositories. No matter what you’re doing, whether it’s mobile, non-mobile, open source, or Microsoft, you can build and deploy through VSTS in the cloud, or Team Foundation Server (TFS) for an on-prem or a locked-down environment model.

2. If you’re new to Azure and DevOps, there is an easy starting point

Azure DevOps Projects brings VSTS, Application Insights, and Azure together into one portal. Out of the box, the guided process helps you to set up and define CI/CD pipelines. It’s about the most minimal release process you can get.

3. “Can we do it faster?” is really a question about the test environment

Developers know that a code base is only as good as the quality of the testing it has been subjected to. Whether your application is on-premises or in the cloud, automated build-deploy-test workflows test your changes continuously.

The workshop videos are viewable on our YouTube channel:

Black Marble: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcDoGrVzdf8&t=1310s

Microsoft: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnA5kLogS6g&t=4377s