Deploying Infrastructure to AWS LIghtsail Using Azure DevOps – Part 1 - Writing IaC Script with bash

AWS Lightsail is easy to use cloud platform services by Amazon Web Services. You can use aws command line capabilities with Azure DevOps to deploy the required infrastructure on AWS Lightsail. Let’s look at step by step to see how we can get AWS Lightsail deployments via Azure DevOps.

Copy Azure Git Repo Branch Policies from One Branch to Another

Some teams when they practice Agile sprints keep a branch for the life of the sprint. In this case they do branch to develop features, make pull requests to sprint branch and release from the sprint branch at the end of the sprint. It is important to protect the sprint branch from incoming pull requests with policies. Since, there is no out of the box way to copy over the policies defined in one branch to another, each sprint the policies need to be created for the new sprint branch, which makes it a cumbersome process. In order to make it possible to copy set of policies defined in a branch to another, in Azure Git repos, now you can use the script made available here.

Pushing NuGet Packages to Azure DevOps Artifact Feeds Manually

In the build pipelines of Azure DevOps we can easily push a NuGet package, using a NuGet push step and selecting the artifact feed, in the Azure DevOps organization or team project. But you may sometimes need to push packages manually to Azure Artifact feeds. Let’s look at how we can do that.

Running EF Commands in Builds with .NET Core 3.1 in Hosted Agents

When you run builds with Entity Framework (EF) commands such as dotnet ef migrations script with .NET Core 2.2 it would work without any issue. However, if you upgrade your projects to use .NET Core 3.1 your build may fail with issue below., when executing dotnet ef migrations script, to generate a script out of your EF migrations.
error NETSDK1045: The current .NET SDK does not support targeting .NET Core 3.1. Either target .NET Core 2.2 or lower, or use a version of the .NET SDK that supports .NET Core 3.1.

Deploying Machine Learning (ML) Model with Azure Pipeline Using Deployable Artifact from Build

We have discussed how to create a Machine Learning (ML) model as a deployable artifact in the post “Training Machine Learning (ML) Model with Azure Pipeline and Output ML Model as Deployable Artifact” which is based on the open source ML repo, (https://github.com/SaschaDittmann/MLOps-Lab.git) with data by Sascha Dittmann, which also contains the code to train a model.

Training Machine Learning (ML) Model with Azure Pipeline and Output ML Model as Deployable Artifact

Training a machine learning model requires wide range of quality data to get the ML model trained in such a way that it can provide accurate predictions. Azure build pipeline can run the python tests written to validate the data quality and the train a model with uploaded data to Azure ML workspace. In this post on “Setup MLOPS workspace using Azure DevOps pipeline” it is clearly explained how to setup an Azure ML workspace in a new resource group dynamically with Azure CLI ML command extension. The post “Setup MLOPS workspace using Azure DevOps pipeline” as well as this post on training a model with Azure pipelines use the open source ML repo (https://github.com/SaschaDittmann/MLOps-Lab.git) with data by Sascha Dittmann, and code to train a model.

Resolving Issues with | Symbol in PowerShell While Creating Node Web App in Azure CLI

You can use Azure Command Line Interface with PowerShell to create infrastructure as code (IaC) scripts, for implementing deployment of resources in Azure platform services. When you try to create a web app in Azure with run time specified with Azure CLI in PowerShell, | symbol used in runtime specification causes issues as it is trying to do a pipe operation in PowerShell. Let’s look at the issue and how to get it resolved in PowerShell and Azure CLI based IaC scripts.

Replacing iOS .plist Array Properties in Azure Release Pipelines

.plist files are used by iOS applications to keep configuration properties. These files support arrays as configurations. In deployment process of Azure DevOps pipelines you may want to update these plist files to have values relevant to the target deployment environments. Let’s see usage of plistbuddy utility to update array items in plist files as the plutil (http://scriptingosx.com/2016/11/editing-property-lists/) is unable to apply the changes.