IntegrationWorkz

To make the switch from the graphical release pipelines in Azure DevOps I am missing two features. The first one is to be able to defer a deploy and the second one is to exclude certain deployment steps without the need for editing the YAML file.  The defer option is something Microsoft has to solve in their Azure DevOps proposition. It's a feature which you have in the graphical release pipeline but what they have not implemented yet in their YAML pipeline replacement. Approvals and certain gate conditions are implemented on the environment but the defer option is still missing .  Pipeline The conditional deployment option can be implemented with the help of runtime parameters and expressions . In the parameter section you define boolean parameters which will control the deploy behavior. With the expressions you can control which stage/job/task should be executed when the pipeline runs. In the below YAML sample I experimented with conditions in the azure-pipelines.yml ...

In my post called " Switch from Azure DevOps release pipeline to YAML based CI/CD pipeline " I explained how to implement a combined CI/CD pipeline based on YAML templates. Because most of the deployments in my daily work are consuming multiple artifacts I had to do some additional R&D to find a solution for those releases in Azure DevOps. Base structure In the first post about the transition to YAML CI/CD pipelines I introduced the base structure. The templates I want to reuse are added to the yaml-template folders in the root of my GIT repo. For the CD pipelines which lack a CI phase I introduce a new folder called yaml-releases which will contain the YAML files for releases which are based on multiple artifacts. The folder structure within my GIT repo is thus: yaml-releases releaseArea myMultipleArtifactsRelease azure-pipelines.yml cd-job.yml yaml-templates jobs ... templates ......

It has been years ago I started applying continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) principles at work. Around 2005, it was the time of Visual Studio 2005 Team System, we started using a build server in our daily development process. From then on it was no longer more: "it works on my machine". With every check-in of code changes a CI build was started which compiled your code and run unit tests which verified the quality of your code.  Deployment was in the beginning still a process of manually copying build artifacts and script files to servers and doing the installation process based on the instructions from the deployment manual (if available). Gradually it migrated to scripts (mix of batch/PowerShell/VBScript files) that our release automatically ran from the build server. In 2016 we migrated from our on-premise TFS 2008 based environment to the cloud solution nowadays known as Azure DevOps . We upgraded our MSBuild driven CI/CD pipelines to the new vis...

This month I attended the Integrate 2018 integration congress which was held from June 4-6 in London. These three days I and all other attendees where informed about the latest low-code and serverless integration solutions in the Azure cloud. Think about solutions like Logic Apps, Azure Functions, Event Grid and API Management. One general theme I was missing during all these sessions is the testability of the solution. For BizTalk my team invested a lot of time in writing unit tests for our solutions. One of my colleagues wrote an unit test framework which let us test our XML schemas, XSLTs and pipeline components for example based on the MSTest framework. Our CI/CD pipeline will execute these test every time the code is checked in and the BizTalk solution has not to be deployed on an actual BizTalk environment. With these low-code/serverless tools it feels I am back in the work on my machine (actual environment) and the labour intensive manually testing era. None of the speakers m...

Eldert Grootenboer ( Motion10 ) posted a series of blog posts around setting up CI/CD for Azure API Management using Azure Resource Manager templates. In his series he describes how you can using Visual Studio Team Services to host GIT repositories and set up a build and release pipeline for deploying your API Management service and it's APIs. This blog post is an extension on his first article wich describes the setup for deploying the API Management service and is done as a nested ARM template (as described in the linked template article). Scenario The API Management service is default hosted under Microsoft's azure-api.net DNS domain. To provide a professional experience to our developers we want to host our API Management service under our own DNS domain. The SSL certificate will be stored in Azure Key Vault and the configuration will be part of the CI/CD pipeline as described by Eldert in his blog posts. To make the scenario more production like we will store ...