If you haven’t already, placing a customisation on your command prompt for PowerShell is a great way to gain extra context in given activities. For example, if you would like to have a comprehensive overview of your Git status summary information, then posh-git is for you. Be Careful: Adding customisations will …

Background Azure role-based access control (Azure RBAC) provides fine grained control over access to Azure resources. Azure RBAC is founded on top of the Azure Resource Manager which allows us to provide access authorisation at differing scope levels ranging from the Management Group through to individual resources. …

Problem Space There is a potential unintentional side effect when you add a APIM subscription key as a header to an inbound request. The header is not stripped from the request prior to being sent to the configured backend service. Rather it is retained. If you manage the backing service and are not concerned with the …

Problem Space I have often found myself with a peeked interest into any method that will simplify both the on-boarding and return to a given project. Why the interest you may ask… Well, in most cases when working on a given project (Greenfield or Brownfield), one member of the team will scout ahead to make sure …

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 …