DevOps

Considered to be best practices in AWS, as well as one of the most popular ways to fully maximize the potential of AWS, is to utilize multiple accounts. Accounts can be set up as either per-organization, per-department, or even per-application and can be utilized to logically and physically separate any resources to fit your organization’s needs. This, combined with master-account billing and properly utilizing Tags, can allow you to be as separate, yet collected, as you see fit.

Learn about creating, employing, or utilizing a framework for your functional tests to drastically improve your testing that benefits of creating functional test framework and what that framework might look like.

WebJobs and Function Apps are both services in Azure to run triggered or scheduled tasks. This blog posts compares the two services and outlines cases where one solution may be preferred over the other.

Learning how to improve our functional testing capabilities one step at a time

Let’s take a look at a simple example of using the Visual Studio Online REST API to retrieve information about a build using PowerShell. Then we’ll take a look at how we can use the information we retrieved in a vNext build step.

Recently, at Mercury New Media we had a client request that we upload IIS log files to their server on a nightly basis. The request was to rename IIS logs to follow the requested naming convention and to upload the log files in a zip folder each night. We tossed a few ideas around like console apps, custom services and ultimately settled on a PowerShell script executed by our VM’s task scheduler to fulfill our client’s need. A simple yet effective solution that would be portable and flexible.

In the last post, I described the three main pillars of ALM: Visibility, Traceability and Automation. This post will describe in more detail the systems and processes you can put in place to build these pillars and improve your chances of success.

This is the first blog post in a series about ALM. I have been a developer for many years (oh so many years), and ALM is very close to my heart. I’ve learned from experience that with good ALM, your chances of success increase considerably. Conversely, without it, you’re probably going to fail. I’m a huge fan and I want to share it with you. I’m going to tell you why you should care.