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I used to be a .NET developer. Nowaways, I am a DevOps solutions architect with a focus on Azure and Kubernetes.
I also love productivity topics, especially when it comes to doing more with less of my time. I'm also a daddy, so time is a limited resource for me.
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I'm going to share all my secrets with you
Using a pull-request workflow
This is the guide I wish I had
Connecting your GitHub Workflows to Azure AD using OpenID Connect
In this post, I’ll walk through the essentials of configuring an AKS cluster to use Argo CD with an NGINX Ingress Controller. Pre-Requisites You’ll need: An AKS cluster. Here’s a Gist I use to create a simple cluster. Helm 3 Azure CLI A Custom DNS/A...
In Azure DevOps, it’s convenient and easy to use one of the hosted agent pools. Microsoft takes the time to update the tooling as new versions of the of SDKs come out - like .NET Core. But, there’s one drawback - performance.
It’s not a terrible wait. They perform well considering you don’t have to maintain the image. But, it can be like watching a pot boil.
Azure DevOps creates a Docker image for their Azure Pipelines agent. I have found it particularly useful for building .NET Core apps. Here, there’s no fuzzing about and maintaining a Dockerfile with the dependencies of the build agent.
The best part - you can run it easily as an Azure Container Instance and have it be your own private build agent. Meaning, it will cache your source code and every time you want to pull down dependencies from a feed like NuGet and NPM.
From the Azure DevOps organization settings, create a new agent pool.
Follow these instructions.
Bash:
AZDO_PAT=<YOUR PERSONAL ACCESS TOKEN>
AZDO_POOL_NAME=<YOUR POOL NAME FROM STEP 1>
AZDO_ACCOUNT=<YOUR AZURE DEVOPS ORGANIZATION NAME>
az group create -g 'rg-nebbiademo-shared-001' -l eastus
az container create -g rg-nebbiademo-shared-001 \
--name az-container-1 \
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azure-pipelines/vsts-agent:ubuntu-16.04-docker-17.12.0-ce-standard \
--environment-variables VSTS_ACCOUNT=$AZDO_ACCOUNT \
VSTS_TOKEN=$AZDO_PAT \
VSTS_POOL=$AZDO_POOL_NAME \
VSTS_AGENT='az-container-1'
Powershell:
$AZDO_PAT="<YOUR PERSONAL ACCESS TOKEN>"
$AZDO_POOL_NAME="<YOUR POOL NAME FROM STEP 1>"
$AZDO_ACCOUNT="<YOUR AZURE DEVOPS ORGANIZATION NAME>"
az group create -g 'rg-nebbiademo-shared-001' -l eastus
az container create -g rg-nebbiademo-shared-001 `
--name az-container-1 `
--image mcr.microsoft.com/azure-pipelines/vsts-agent:ubuntu-16.04-docker-17.12.0-ce-standard `
--environment-variables VSTS_ACCOUNT=$AZDO_ACCOUNT `
VSTS_TOKEN=$AZDO_PAT `
VSTS_POOL=$AZDO_POOL_NAME `
VSTS_AGENT='az-container-1'
That’s it! You should see a new agent under the pool.
It’s not all roses. There’s one big limitation. You won’t be able to build docker images with this private agent. It’s not that it’s not possible to build Docker images with Docker build agents, it is. It’s not possible to do with Azure Container Instances. In order to be able to use the Docker daemon, you would have to mount the Docker socket as a volume.
docker run \
-e VSTS_ACCOUNT=<name> \
-e VSTS_TOKEN=<pat> \
-v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \
-it mcr.microsoft.com/azure-pipelines/vsts-agent:ubuntu-16.04-docker-17.12.0-ce-standard
For security reasons, Azure Container Instances doesn’t let you do this.
Lastly, doesn’t look like Microsoft will continue to maintain these Docker images. The Git repo has been deprecated.