This document discusses continuous delivery practices using Visual Studio Team Services, Azure Resource Manager, Azure VM ScaleSets, and PowerShell DSC. It begins with an overview of DevOps and continuous delivery concepts. It then breaks down the components of a continuous delivery pipeline including source control, infrastructure as code, build automation, and release management. Finally, it demonstrates how to put together a continuous delivery pipeline using the listed technologies with examples of ARM templates, VM ScaleSets, PowerShell DSC, and VSTS release management.

1. Continuous Delivery
with Visual Studio Team Services, Azure Resource
Manager, Azure VM ScaleSets, and Powershell DSC
Justin Barias
Readify

2. Agenda
• Brief primer on DevOps
• What’s Continuous *?
• The Continuous Delivery Pipeline
• Breaking it down
• Putting it together

3. What is DevOps?
Automation?
Cloud?
Smaller and faster
releases?
Devs who do Ops?
Ops who do dev?
2 pizza
teams?
Culture
Just a buzzword
Just a title

4. What is DevOps?
• A methodology that promotes collaboration and
coordination between Dev and Ops teams to deliver
products or services in a continuous manner.
• A combination of Culture, Process, and Tools.
• Doesn’t concern just Dev and Ops – all the way from the
ground up

5. The DevOps “journey”
Continous
Integration
Continuous
Delivery
Continuous
Deployment

6. Continuous Integration
Code Build Test
• Ways of working & managing work in progress – Agile
[Scrum/Kanban]
• Source code management [Git/SVN] * including
infrastructure-as-code
• Build Automation
• Artifact Management
• Test Automation * yes, including infrastructure-as-code

7. Let’s talk Infrastructure as Code
(IaC)  Treat as you would Application
Code
 Source control, unit testing,
etc.
 Certain design patterns are
applicable -
decomposition/composition
 Design with the pipeline in
mind
 A good branching strategy
(ideally must match your app
branching)

8. ARM Templates – (PS) Test-
AzureRmResourceGroupDeployment
AWS CloudFormation – (CLI) aws
cloudformation validate-template
Powershell DSC – Pester
Ruby/Ruby DSL-based – Provided
by vendor (Chef/puppet)
Dockerfiles – orchestrator specific
(use rSpec/ServerSpec to test
dockerfiles)
Testing your
infrastructure code

9. Continuous Integration Workflow

10. Continuous
Integration Demo

11. Let’s take a look at the Git repo
ARM
templatesPowershell
DSC*****
Nuget Package Management
StuffHelper scripts
App Source Code (.NET core 1.1
MVC)

12. Continuous Delivery
Provision Deploy
• The practice of testing and releasing builds in an automated
fashion, ensuring it is ”production-ready”
• Provision & configure environments in an idempotent
fashion
• Configure and release application code artifacts in a secure,
automated mannerIdempotence - is the property of certain, that can be applied multiple times without changing the result beyond the initial
application

13. Continuous Delivery Workflow

14. Continuous Deployment
• Is the seamless ”switch” from the previous version of your
application to the new version as soon as a new build is
“delivered” e.g. cut-over
• Perform this in an automated, but quality-gated process

15. Continuous Deployment Strategies
In-place
• Update your
existing app
instances
• Also known as
“rolling
updates”
Blue-Green
• Gradually
replace
existing
instances
(Blue) with
new ones
(Green)
Red-Black
• Cut over from
the old set of
instances to
an entirely
new set of
instances
v1.0
v 1.1
v1.0
v1.0
v1.1 v1.0 v1.1

16. The Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Code Build Test Provision Deploy
Azure Resource
Manager
VM ScaleSets
PowerShell DSC

17. Let’s talk immutable infrastructure
Define Immutable:
ɪˈmjuːtəb(ə)l/
adjective
unchanging over time or unable to be
changed.
Considerations:
• Application config must be defined in release/run time
• Requires blue/green release capability
• Move away from dedicated “environments” (dedicated
dev, uat, staging)
• Might require some custom engineering with
loadbalancers (ELB, AzureAppGw, Traffic Manager)
• Say goodbye to RDP/SSH

18. ARM Templates
• Stack template (master template, linked to
vmfactory-vmss.json)
• VM ScaleSets (with Powershell DSC
extension)
• Test your templates! (Test-
AzureRMResourceGroupDeployment)
Techniques used:
• Link templates
• “Property bagging”
• Conditional variables

19. Nuget Server/Package
Management• Stores, describes, application packages
• Packages are immutable
• Authenticate using a ”Personal Access Token”
• Use vsts/build your own nuget server

20. Powershell DSC
• Two schools of thought for
instance/configuration management:
• Image-baking (use AzurRM.Compute/images
or OSS tools like Packer by Hashicorp)
• Agent-based config mgmt (Chef, Puppet,
DSC)

21. VSTS Release Management
• Technically, a glorified task
runner
• Other options:
• Jenkins (OSS)
• TeamCity
• Octopus Deploy
(proudly made by ex-
Readifarians)
• Build once, release
multiple times
• Don’t hardcode
variables/entries – use
tokenisation tasks or
CMDB (Azure Keyvault,
Consul by hashicorp)

22. Putting it all together

23. Continuous Delivery
Demo

24. One more thing….

25. Let’s release to a Kubernetes cluster..
• Kubernetes – one of the container orchestrator
tools out there (imo the best out there, good job
Google)
• Some kinks to put into a CI/CD pipeline
(especially if using VSTS)
• Azure Container Service is awesome.

26. Git Clone!
Github repo:
https://github.com/justinbarias/ExpertsLiveRepo

27. Thank You
www.expertslive.org.au
#expertsliveau