Honesty time: that title is a bit click-baitish, but the dev community is using a tool that most IT pros don\u2019t know much\/anything about, and it can be a real game changer, especially if you write scripts or work with deployment solutions such as Azure Resource Manager (ARM) JSON templates.<\/p>\n
As soon as I say \u201cDevOps\u201d you\u2019re already reaching for that X on the top right or saying \u201cOh, he\u2019s lost it \u2026 again\u201d. But that\u2019s what I\u2019m going to talk about: DevOps. Or to be more precise, Azure DevOps.<\/p>\n
For years, when I\u2019ve thought about DevOps, I\u2019ve thought \u201cbuggy software with more frequent releases\u201d. And that certainly can be the case. But DevOps is born out of the realisation that how we have engineered software (or planned almost anything, to be honest) for the past few decades has not been ideal. Typically, we have some start-middle-end waterfall approach that assumes we know the end state. If this is a big (budget) or long (time) project, then getting half way to that planned end-state and realising that the preconception was wrong is very expensive \u2013 it leads to headlines! DevOps is a way of saying:<\/p>\n
This is where the project management gurus will come out and say \u201cthis is Scrum\u201d or some other codswallop that I do not care about; that\u2019s the minutia for the project management nerds to worry about.<\/p>\n
Devs started leaning this direction years ago. It\u2019s not something that is always the case \u2013 most devs that I encountered in the past didn\u2019t use some of the platform tools for DevOps such as GitHub or Azure DevOps (previously Teams). But here\u2019s an interesting thing: some businesses are adopting the concepts of \u201cDevOps\u201d for building a business, even if IT isn\u2019t involved, because they realised that some business problems are very like tech problems: big, complex, potentially expensive, and with an unknown end-state.<\/p>\n
I got curious about Azure DevOps last year when my friend, Damian Flynn<\/a>, was talking about it at events. Like me, Damian is an Azure MVP\/IT Pro but, unlike me, he stayed in touch with development after college. I tried googling and reading Microsoft Docs, but the content was written in that nasty circular way that Technet used to be \u2013 there was no entry point for a non-dev that I could find.<\/p>\n And then I changed jobs \u2026 to work with Damian as it happens. We\u2019ve been working on a product together for the last 7 months. And on day 1, he introduced me to DevOps. I\u2019ll be honest, I was lost at first, but after a few attempts and then actually working with it, I have gotten to grips with it and it gives me a structured way to work, plan, and collaborate on a product that will never have and end-state.<\/p>\n I\u2019m not going to tell you exactly<\/em> what I\u2019m working on but it is Azure and it is IT Pro with no dev stuff \u2026 from me, at least. Everything I\u2019ve written or adjusted is PowerShell or Azure JSON. I can work with Damian (who is 2+ hours away by car) on Teams on the same files:<\/p>\n It might all sound complex \u2026 but it really was pretty simple to set up. Now behind the scenes, there is some crazy-mad release \u201cpipelines\u201d stuff that Damian built, and that is far from simple, but not mandatory \u2013 don\u2019t tell Damian that I said that!<\/p>\n Azure DevOps inherits terminology from other sources, such as Git. And that is fine for devs in that space, but some of it made me scratch my head because it sounded \u201cthe wrong way around\u201d. Here\u2019s some of the terms:<\/p>\n The first two tools that you need are free:<\/p>\n And then you need Azure DevOps. That\u2019s where the free pretty much stops and you need to acquire either per-user\/plan licensing<\/a> or get it via MSDN\/Visual Studio licensing<\/a>.<\/p>\n I came into this pretty open minded. Damian\u2019s a smart guy and I had long conversations with one of our managers about these kinds of methodologies after he attended Scrum master training.<\/p>\n Some of the stuff in DevOps is nasty. The terminology doesn’t help, but I hope the above helps. Pipelines is still a mystery to me. Microsoft shared a doc<\/a> to show how to integrate a JSON release via Pipelines and it’s a big ol’ mess of things to be done. I’ll be honest … I don’t go near that stuff.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think that me and Damian could have collaborated the way we have without DevOps. We\u2019ve written many thousands of lines of code, planned tasks, fought bugs. It\u2019s been done without a project manager \u2013 we discuss\/record ideas, prioritize them, and then pull (assign to ourselves) the tasks when we have time. At times, we have worked in the same spaces and been able to work as one. And importantly, when it comes to pull requests, we peer review. The methodology has allowed other colleagues to participate and we\u2019re already looking at how we can grow that more in the organization to bring in more skills\/experience into the product. Without (Azure) DevOps we could not have done that \u2026 certainly storing code on some file storage in the cloud would have been a total disaster and lacked the structure that we have had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Honesty time: that title is a bit click-baitish, but the dev community is using a tool that most IT pros don\u2019t know much\/anything about, and it can be a real game changer, especially if you write scripts or work with deployment solutions such as Azure Resource Manager (ARM) JSON templates. Shot Time As soon as … Continue reading “The Secret Sauce That Devs Don\u2019t Want IT Pros to Know About”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21599,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"_wpcom_ai_launchpad_first_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[161,170,383,384,385,386,247,87,266,387,388],"class_list":["post-21600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-azure","tag-arm","tag-azure","tag-azure-devops","tag-devops","tag-git","tag-github","tag-json","tag-powershell","tag-template","tag-visual-studio-code","tag-vs-code"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\tWhat I\u2019m Working On<\/h2>\n
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Confusing Terminology<\/h2>\n
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Getting Started<\/h2>\n
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Opinion<\/h2>\n