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Global DevOps Bootcamp in Munich

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On Saturday June 17, 2017 Microsoft arranged the first Global DevOps Bootcamp; as registration to the event in Copenhagen has been already closed when I saw the invitation, I decided to go to Munich to participate in this event. I expected them to tell a little bit more about what actually is DevOps, how you can deal with it in a Microsoft Technology environment and how to derive plans for getting your existing application components moved to a modern cloud and/or hybrid environment model to deliver value fast. Most of that has been satisfied, together with the challenges to achieve some score.

As you may know Im working with an Infrastucture team for my current employer for about 3 years now, so the cloud – and as I’m working with Microsofts technologie this mainly means working on Azures Infrastructure services – is a frequent topic. We frequently still need to answer questions on what is it good for? , how can I use it?. Some customers here in Germany still have some reservation about using cloud services in general (Mr Trump, Brexit and other events like that are not helpful to open peoples mind about a global datacenter usage, here) although Microsoft already created a new “German Cloud” Datacenter. And when you completed the privacy and security discussion you can go back on track to answer the questions about how to move your applications.

This is where DevOps comes into play in my own day-by-day work; and I must to admit that I’m still suprised about the Keynote from Donovan Brown #blackshirt that constantly tells you to not ask for permission to do the right things as long as you do the right things.  But then – once again – there was the main fact: don’t as for permission to include testing efforts and what else is required  to get it done. They also dont ask you for permission to call you in the night or take away your weekend in case the system goes down as well. Yes, he is defintely right.

If you want to get more imges and thoughts about this project, you can find it on Twitter using the #gdbc #gdevopsdb #munich hashtags and https://global.azurebootcamp.net/ . I want to emphasize that because compared with the Azure Saturday next week in Munich I nearly missed to find this event. It’s sure: I will double check not to miss this event in 2018 and hopoefully they do an update event about DevOps and what happens next.

The other thing that I will keep on my mind is from a slide that Taghi Paksima (the local DevOps evangelist that lead the session at Microsoft Munich, Germany) has shown: Automate Everything – and this means: include your infrastructure! You got me. .

Taghis great talk (very interactive) about DevOps and whats important, whats your goal and what is this DevOps thing all about took about an hour. Not everything of it was really new to me. But on my personal journey to DevOps it’s a good thing to hear the one and the other idea repeatedly. This becomes more important as I need to switch between thinking the DevOps approach against some day-by-day requirements when working in a classic tower infrastructure team.

The Global DevOps Bootcamp Event

After the Keynote and some initial slides, there were three challenges to complete. Try it by your own by clicking the title in the text below.

Challenge 1

Challenge 1 : clone the MvcMusicStore from https://github.com/GlobalDevOpsBootcamp/challenge1 to your VSTS project and re-publish it on your Azure app service. They named this “move a legacy app to the cloud”. OK, there were some more details to complete as in our VSTS project you also needed to create a custom build agent on a local machine (and local in this context meant that you needed to install a build agent to an Azure VM they deployed earlier).

This is some task that I’m already familiar with, as I joined a workshop about Continous Integration at #MSTS2016 last December. Said and done.

Challenge 2

Challenge 2 : this time you needed to move the MvcMusicStore app to a docker container. to do that you needed to create an Azure container registry and create a new build and release task. In addition you were required to create your own Azure container registry that needed to be configured in your build/release configuration in VSTS. Our team03 struggled a while with the build definition and where to place the Dockerfile and the ASP.net msi packages in the project, but at the end this has been solved as well.

Challenge 3

Challenge 3 was about creating Azure functions. For the first achievement you needed to create some simple function to send out SMS using Twilio. To be honest: I do not like  Twilio in a trial setup, as it respond with a “you’re not capable of any number to send SMS” error. So while we had no worries to create the function on Azure, we struggled a lot with  Twilio.  For that reason we unfortunately did not complete all the steps required in challenge 3.

Resume

OK, let me mention first that our team won the challenges in Munich and achieved some geek shirts and books.

After this let’s thank you Taghi Paksima, Michael Kaufmann, all the other MVPs in Munich as well as on the other loications all around the globe that imolated their weekend just to make an event like this possible. I hope you had a good event as well.

The other conclusion is about the team itself: notice that it took less than 5 minutes for a group of 60 people to create teams with 5 members each. We are technical guys, we do not worry about team-building. The other thing one of my mates emphasized that you’re talking about your interface the most: who expects what from whom and what currently hangs as long as this is not done, yet.

In our team this worked perfectly fine and you can take away that this is key to success.

Ah, and I can’t wait to see what comes up next week at Azure Saturday!