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 …

The Issue

Whilst updating a client’s Duende Identity Server from versions 6 to 7, we experienced a problem. We followed the upgrade steps and all was working fine against our development instance i.e. the Identity Server Db was upgraded to the current schema and we could login from our test MVC web client without …

Problem Space

There have been few times where I have landed into this particular predicament whereby either by my own doing or through the use of another’s code base, a deep nested or thoroughly utilised (parameter/variable/or other defined item) has been created with the same name as a Bicep function. As by …

The Issue

Within one of our Azure DevOps builds we today started to see the following error when running the SonarQube analysis step:

##[error][SQ] Task failed with status FAILED, Error message: Unrecoverable indexing failures: 1 errors among 1 requests. Check Elasticsearch logs for further details.

Nothing obvious …