The Issue

I recently upgraded a clients Azure DevOps server from 2019 to 2022. This required a new application tier VM due to the change in supported versions of Windows Server between the two versions.

Unfortunately, the client’s developers had always accessed the old Azure DevOps Server using the VMs FQDN, as …

Problem Space

Deploying solutions into Azure that rely on Role Based Access often involve us creating IaC automation for the assignment of roles, such as:

• A services access to Key Vault
• A services access to a Key Vault specific secret
• A services access to a storage account
• A services access to a Service Bus Queue or …

The Issue

Last week I noticed that the staging URL that is normally output as a comment was missing from new GitHub PRs. Previously, this URL was added automatically by the Azure/static-web-apps-deploy GitHub Action for PRs in our Hugo based websites.

After a bit of digging, I noticed a warning message in the logs of …

Just a little reminder, probably to my future self, to not call your Azure DevOps YAML Deployment stage ‘deployment’.

If you forget you can expect to waste plenty of time, like we did last week, with environment agents not picking up queued jobs with no diagnostic logging messages to give you a clue as to …

Background

I just upgraded our Azure/Docker container hosted SonarQube instance from 10.5.1 to 10.6.0. This was partly due to our usual upgrade process, we try to upgrade within a week or so of a new release, but also to address a specific Java issue we started to see when using the SonarQube@6 Azure DevOps tasks.

The …

The Problem

I have an Azure DevOps YAML template that does some deployment actions using PowerShell. This template is used multiple locations. The problem is that the PowerShell step within the template needs a variable number of environment variables, set from values stored in an Azure DevOps variable Group. The …

I have blogged in the past about Caching NVD Vulnerability Dependency data on hosted Azure DevOps Pipeline agents. Using the cache is a great way to speed up slow builds.

However, today I was surprised to find I was getting cache misses on my pipeline, even though I was sure the cache should have been hit.

There are …

There is still time to register for the free Global DevOps Experience which is being run on the 15th of June at many venues around the world, including Black Marble’s offices.

The Global DevOps Experience is a day full of learning and fun, as we immerse you in the world of DevOps and AI. You will learn about the …

Background

For a while now I have made good use of the Trace functionality in the API Management (APIM) Test Client. If you haven’t, I would highly advise having a look. The Trace functionality allows us to unveil (debug) the complexity and inner workings of our reverse proxy APIs (their routing / hierarchical …

The Issue

Whilst migrating some Azure DevOps classic pipelines to templated multi-stage YAML, I hit a problem that a job running on a self-hosted agent would not start.

The YAML stage, which required approval, would be queued and approved, but the agent would just sit there with the message Starting job but would never …