The Problem I have been using Packer to generate our Azure DevOps Build agent VHD images for a while now, but when I came to regenerate them this time I hit a problem. As I have documented previously, our process is that we update our fork of the Microsoft repository and then merge the newest changes into our long …

In advance of my upcoming Black Marble Webinar on the 18th October entitled 'Practical DevOps in the Enterprise', I have written a whitepaper of the same name. You can find the whitepaper on LinkedIn and register for this, and other free Black Marble webinars and in-person events, via the Black Marble website.

The Problem We run our SonarQube instance in a Docker container hosted in an Azure Web App Service. Today, with no notice, it failed. We did the obvious, just tried to restart it and the startup process failed. Looking at the Azure Web App's Log Stream we could see the following error repeated on each restart attempt …

The Issue If you are using Azure Scale Set based Azure DevOps Agent Pools (VMSS) to provide dynamically scalable agent pools, unlike with self hosted agent pools, there is no capabilities tab for the individual agents. My understanding is that this UX design choice was made as the capabilities of all the agents in a …

Background I have recently been looking at getting Snipe-IT running on Azure using a Docker container. Though the documentation for this project is good, the detail for the Azure setup is a little lacking. So I thought I would document the steps and Rik Hepworth took to get it working. Notes: This is a simple …

The Problem Recently had an issue on a project that had been paused for a few months. When we restarted the project we found that the SonarCloud PR analysis, running via an Azure DevOps YAML pipeline, was failing with a 404 error. The strange thing was that the same pipeline running analysis of the main trunk or the …

The Problem Recently an Azure DevOps Pipeline for a .NET 6 based Azure Functions started to fail on some of our self-hosted build agents with the error …

Around a year ago I posted on 'Social Media Posts after Migrating from WordPress to Hugo Static Pages'. Recently I have found that the Twitter functionality in my Logic App was failing. Turns out this was due to the changes in the Twitter Free API, with them moving from V1 to V2 which requires OAuth authentication as …

Updated: 19 Jul 2023 - Revised the post to use Az CLI Task as opposed to a PowerShell Task Background Azure DevOps Pipelines have a built in mechanism to run maintenance jobs on a schedule. This is great for cleaning out old temporary data, but what if you want to run your own maintenance job? Writing a pipeline to run …

In a modern hybrid cloud world we have to accept constant change as the norm. You can't just build something and forget about it. You have to keep it up to date as newer tools/libraries appear. This is to at least address security issues, even if you don't want to adopt the new features. So I am expecting a degree of …