Cloud as a Story - Vunvulea Radu

In the last weeks, Microsoft announced a new cloud service available for all – Azure DevOps. The main scope of this post is to identify the core features of this new service and what are the differences between Visual Studio Team Services and Azure DevOps. What? Azure DevOps it is a collection of services used during the software development phase. All these services are interconnected between each other and can be orchestrated from one location. There is full support for services like: Task Management and Tracking (Agile boards, including Kanban) Source Control (Git) Build and Release for CI/CD Testing (Load and Performance Testing, manual or exploring testing) Wiki Reporting and custom dashboard capability CI/CD pipelines Extension for integration with 3rd parties Services Overview Some services are similar from the functionality perspective with the previous service called VSTS. It is normal because Microsoft replaces the original service (VSTS) with Azure DevOps t...

Did you ever have a requirement that specifies that once a document is written in storage, nobody shall be able to modify or delete it, including the administrators?  OR Do you have a special business requirement that specifies that audit data can be written only once and nobody shall be able to alter them? WORM This kind of business requirements are called WORM (Write Once, Read Many) and are common for industries like financial or healthcare. When you have such a requirement on top of Azure, there were not too many options until now. What we had until now? With available features of Azure Storage, you could define groups of users that are allowed only to do read operations. The same thing can be accomplished if you wrap everything behind an API (e.g., REST API) that manage one operation are allowed or not. In both scenarios, you still have some users or access keys that can do delete or update actions. From this perspective, it is impossible to guaranty or offers an SLA ...

In this post, we tackle the cost estimation of a CI/CD system that is hosted on top of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). Context We are starting from an on-premises system that has a CI/CD system build on top of Jenkins, which deploys the web application on a local IIS. Beside web application, we have for each project an SQL Server Database that can reach up to 100GB. The source control repository is GitHub, and for task management and tracking, we have JIRA. In the current environment, we have around 20 projects that need such a migration, but the cost estimation is done project base, allowing us to have a better forecast for each project. We don’t take into consideration any other dependencies that a specific project could have like Windows Services. Most of the client is already using Azure to host their production environments for their web application. Going into the cloud is more than acceptable for them. Beside this remember that you have the code inside GitHub. In som...