3 DevOps Blogs Every Developer Should Follow
DevOps is all the rage, a new “buzzword” you hear quite a bit these days. Actually, it’s not really a new buzzword, or even a buzzword at all. It’s a carefully considered name for what has been an evolving practice that makes good sense.
DevOps is essentially an evolution of development processes like Agile. It’s a more thoughtful, composed way of developing and deploying applications; much of which depends on automation.
TechMentor co-chair Don Jones elaborated on his take on DevOps at the last TechMentor. "DevOps actually is real," says Jones. "It's not something you can buy. It doesn't come with a contract. It is a real concrete thing. It is something you can do."
Donovan Brown actually had to define DevOps during his interview with Microsoft. He must have defined it well, but he has now been working with Microsoft for several years now. When he spoke at a recent Visual Studio Live! held at Microsoft headquarters, he relayed his definition. "DevOps is a union of people, process and products to deliver continuous value to our customers," he says.
To continue navigating this evolving practice, here are three of the best DevOps blogs you should follow:
Besides his work with Microsoft, Donovan also runs a Devops blog, simply called donovanbrown.com. Recent coverage on his blog includes how to stop wasting time during .NET Core builds, how to change the language mode of an unsaved file in Visual Studio code, and Visual Studio Team Server task types. His blog goes fairly deep and specific, but the breadth of coverage makes this one definitely worth reading on a regular basis.
One post explores a codedUI build validation test in TFS 2015 Integrated Release. In the course of researching this topic, Brown realized he needed to disable three security controls, including:
- Disable the Privacy warning at Logon
- Disable screensaver
- Disable auto screen lock
He was able to bypass those by using some PowerShell scripts to modify the registry values of the BVT machine. “The Registry valued will be reverted on regular update by your companies Group Policies. So we just need to add a PowerShell task before Test Agent installation,” he writes.
Another good stop to learn more about DevOps, again with a focus on the “dev” side, is Shobin Mathew’s Microsoft ALM DevOps blog. This is a similarly technical, development-oriented blog that covers a range of technical specifics like TFS 2015 Integrated Release cross-domain deployment, Windows OS information using PowerShell, and Proxy Server in TFS: Configuration for dev environment and benefits.
Yet another excellent DevOps resource for developers is Eric Anderson’s ericsysmin.com blog. He covers a range of high-level and nitty-gritty topics, including:
- How to Install Ansible on Windows
- How to cloud
- Automate Everything
- "DevOps Really….."
That last one is his definition of DevOps, which also focuses on automation:
“DevOps is not one thing. It’s a plethora of ideas, and practices that have revolutionized Operations and the Release Process. It’s a culture change. DevOps is using development practices and applying them to operations, then using those methods to automate everything. It starts to join both Operations and Development together, consider it as a hybrid, I mean it is DevOps, it’s the joining of Development and Operations. DevOps was created to empower developers to quickly integrate and build environments to test code, and allows the operations teams to quickly deploy and monitor applications just as fast as the developers and QA teams can approve it, thus leading to Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment.”
And there you have it—DevOps defined. What other DevOps blogs do you regularly follow? Comment and let us know!
Posted by Lafe Low on 10/03/2016 at 1:30 PM