Showing posts with label DevOps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DevOps. Show all posts

Sunday, November 5, 2017

Containers on Azure as part of a CI/CD pipeline




In my previous posts I was speaking about the journey to go from setting up a container and ultimately publishing it in a continuous fashion to a registry using VSTS.

You may have noticed that a lot of time has elapsed since my last post, and there are a couple of reasons for that.

First of all, the impediment of work, secondly, I noticed a trend where it became fairly popular to blog about the journey from where I ended off and I hung back and followed those for a while.

Instead of me going ahead and creating a bunch of posts to show how to publish your container and run it in production, I’m going to hand it off to a bunch of other capable people :-)

To delve deeper, or just for more information, these are all good reads:


And if you are interested in a brief discussion on how to move to a microservices based architecture this is a good read : Modernizing a Monolithic Application using Microservices and Azure

 

Monday, January 30, 2017

Deploy Docker images to a Private Azure Container Registry

This post continues the journey of creating a dotnet application, containerizing and ultimately deploying the image to production.

The first thing we need to do is to get the source into a source repository (I’m of course going to use VSTS), then we need to configure a build and then push the images to a registry. We will then be able to deploy the images from the registry to our hosts, but more on that later.
Note: Some of these steps may incur some cost, so I would highly recommend at the very least creating a Dev Essentials account. This should cover any costs while we are playing.

I’m assuming you have already pushed your code to a repository in VSTS, so the next step is to create an Azure account, if you have not got one already, and then to setup a container registry.

To create your own private azure container registry to publish the images to:
  1. Login to azure
  2. Select container registries
    image 
  3. This should give you a list and you will need to click “add” to create a new container registry
  4. Fill in the required details and create a new registry
  5. Once created, open up the blade and select the Access Key settings. This should contain the registry name, login server and user name and password details (make sure the “Admin User” is enabled)
    image

Now lets move on to VSTS.
First we need to “connect” VSTS and your container registry:
  1. Login to your VSTS project and under settings, select the services configuration:
    image
  2. Using the details that were in the Access Key settings on the Azure container registry blade, create a docker registry service with your “Login Server” as the docker registry url and the user name and password:
    image

Finally it is time to create the builds. As you would expect, go add a new “empty” build definition that links to your source repository. Instead of selecting the “Hosted” build queue, use the “Hosted Linux Preview” queue. Docker is not available on the normal hosted windows agents yet.
Add 2 command line tasks and 3 docker tasks:
image

Note: If you do not have the docker tasks, then you will need to go and install them from the market place
Now configure the tasks as follows:

Command Line 1 Tool: dotnet
Arguments: restore
Advanced/Working Folder : The folder that your source is located in. In my case it was $(build.sourcesdirectory)/dotnet_sample/
Command Line 2 Tool: dotnet
Arguments : publish -c release -o $(build.sourcesdirectory)/dotnet_sample/output/ or an "output" folder under your source location
Advanced/Working Folder : see above
Docker 1 Docker Registry Connection : the service connection that you created earlier
Action : Build an image
Docker File : The location of your docker file. In my case it was $(build.sourcesdirectory)/dotnet_sample/dockerfile
Build Context: The location of your source code. In my case $(build.sourcesdirectory)/dotnet_sample
Image Name: The name and tag that you want to give your image. In my case I just used dotnet_sample:$(Build.BuildId)
Advanced/Working Folder : same as the other working folders
Docker 2 Docker Registry Connection : the service connection that you created earlier
Action : Run a Docker Command
Command : tag dotnet_sample:$(Build.BuildId) $(DockerRegistryUrl)/sample/dotnet_sample:$(Build.BuildId) the name must be the same as in the task above, and the $(DockerRegistryUrl) must be your Azure container registry url or login server
Advanced/Working Folder : same as the other working folders
Docker 3 Docker Registry Connection : the service connection that you created earlier
Action : Push an image
Image Name : The name you passed in when tagging your container above. In my case it was $(DockerRegistryUrl)/sample/dotnet_sample:$(Build.BuildId)
Advanced/Working Folder : same as the other working folders

Now you can save and queue the build. Hopefully it will look something like this:
image

If all has passed, a quick and easy way to see if your image is in your registry is to navigate to your docker registry’s catalogue url : “https://<<registry_url>>/v2/_catalog”. This will likely prompt you to login with the username and password that you setup previously and then you will download a json file. Opening this file will provide you with all the images hosted in your registry.

In this post we have moved from a locally created image to one residing in our private registry. In the next post we will continue the journey a bit further…

Thursday, November 10, 2016

It’s time the DevOps “fad” is over now!

This is a rant that has been building up for a while, so if you are strongly opinionated maybe you should move on to the next blog post and skip this one…

It is my opinion that it is time for the “next” buzzword to start making its appearance in IT. Maybe we should call it Tom, or maybe COD (Container Orientated Development); ooh what about DevCon (Development Containers), you know ‘cause containers is one of the things right now.

Anyway, let’s not get side-tracked. DevOps is one of those things that most people do not understand, but everyone wants a finger in the pie. Unfortunately, vendors probably have a lot of blame in this field, supplying DevOps services and practitioners, throwing DevOps into every second sentence. I kid you not, I was in a meeting last week where a “DevOps” vendor was literarily interchanging CI (Continuous Integration) with DevOps: “I have the build setup for CI, you know DevOps”. Wonder what Donovan Brown would say about that… It is like people that religiously follow a Banting Diet and yet still consumes loads of beer. They do not understand the principles, or what they are supposed to be doing, and/or why they are supposed to be doing it!

Execs hear the world speaking about DevOps and they want themselves a piece of that pie. So the first person/vendor that comes along and throws in the words at strategic places gets the jobs.

I had a discussion today with a client that is “big” into the DevOps thing. They want to remove all rights from developers to be able to branch their Git repositories. In my mind that goes against the two, largely unspoken, aspects of DevOps namely People and Process. Sure the Tool will be able to do branching and remove rights from groups of people, but won’t losing the ability to branch when needed impede the process of agility and cause the people to be unproductive while they are trying to slash red tape and justify the creation of new branches?

Getting back to my initial point; There are a few strong voices that barely reach out above all the noise around DevOps, and they talk a good talk. If you look back over IT’s (short) history you notice that once the big self-serving hordes have moved on to the “next” thing, then the die-hards can get to bedding down concepts and approaches. Look at scrum, ALM, a lot of developer practices. I realise that this means that as a vendor myself, I will find it harder to stay afloat, but for my own sanity maybe it is worth it!