The kind folks over at The Azure Podcast had me on as a guest where I chatted with them about some interesting ways customers have leveraged Azure DevOps pipelines to address complex management of large cloud deployments for doing simple tasks such as deploying new software to more complex operations such as patching or tearing environments up and down.
In my experiences as a developer/software engineer I often find that those responsible for infrastructure deployments often believe tooling with the word ‘Dev’ in them is not for them. This couldn’t be further from the truth as Azure DevOps doesn’t just provide facilities to build/test code but also has powerful capabilities you can leverage to automate ‘tasks’ on infrastructure sitting literally anywhere: Your data-center, Co-location facilities, other clouds or Azure! The way this is accomplished is by installing an agent on your Linux, Windows or MacOS machines that pull operations/tasks needed to be performed securely (over port 443) from the DevOps environment hosted in Azure. This is an extremely firewall friendly way to automate tasks and operations on infrastructure you own/operate. Stay tuned for more to come on how some of my customers have addressed some challenging situations!