Managing Planned Maintenance for Azure Container Apps

Azure Container App is a fully managed Azure service that receives regular updates automatically. These updates are applied with minimal impact on the container applications. However, Azure Container App users can now define a maintenance window, allowing them to schedule service maintenance at a convenient time. This ensures application availability during important periods without downtime due to service maintenance.

There are two types of service updates, critical and non-critical updates. Critical updates are applied immediately when required, and users cannot set a maintenance window for them. However, maintenance windows can be set for non-critical updates. This blog explains how to set a maintenance window for Azure Container App using a GitHub Action pipeline.

Conditional Variable Assignment in Azure DevOps Pipelines

Azure DevOps pipeline expression functions enable the creation of powerful Azure DevOps YAML pipelines to achieve various advanced automation needs for build and deployment purposes. This blog explains how to use the if condition with pipeline variable values.

In an Azure DevOps YAML pipeline, a variable if condition can be defined as follow

iif(condition, the_value_returns_when_condition_true, the_value_returns_when_condition_false) 

Enhance Your Azure Kubernetes Service Experience with GitHub Copilot Plugins

This blog explains how to use GitHub Copilot Chat to perform various Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) tasks, such as creating an AKS cluster and generating kubectl commands to interact with the cluster.

Prerequisites:

• GitHub Copilot and GitHub Copilot for Azure installed
• Azure Kubernetes Service extension for Visual Studio Code installed

Docker Log Options for Better Troubleshooting

Logs are essential for troubleshooting any issues encountered during the software development and delivery process. Docker also provides several logging options to aid in the troubleshooting experience. This blog discusses various ways to review log files with Docker

Pre-requisites:

• Docker installed development machine
• Basic knowledge on Docker commands

Enabling Azure Container Storage Monitoring with Managed Prometheus

Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus is a fully managed monitoring solution in Azure Monitor. It allows us to collect Prometheus metrics from Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) clusters to monitor the workload.

This blog provides a guide on monitoring stateful workloads running on Azure Container Service within an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster with managed Prometheus enabled.

Understanding Repository Health and Usage in Azure DevOps

Maintaining optimal repository health is crucial factor to ensure performance and reliability. Azure DevOps Health and usage provides several helpful factors like repository size, object numbers, commit frequency, contents, and structure that can be usable to ensure performance and reliability.

Azure DevOps Repository Health and usage give values for the followings.

Working with Unskippable Stages in Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps pipelines have several stages, and we can use these stages to fulfill various specific automation requirements. However, there can be stages that should not be skipped during the deployment process for any reason. For example, some organizations may have a policy that it is mandatory to run automated tests before deployment, or it is mandatory to run a security scan stage. By default, Azure DevOps allows its users to skip stages when initiating a new pipeline run. Now, Azure DevOps has introduced a new property that can be used with YAML pipelines to disable the option to skip stages during the pipeline creation.

Pre-requisites:

Azure DevOps YAML pipeline with multiple stages

Simplifying Docker Authentication in Azure DevOps with Azure Workload Identity

Credential based authentication methods have several disadvantages such as security risks and secret management overhead. As a solution Azure Managed Identity and Azure Workload Identity can be used as modern and secure, non-credential-based authentication method for workloads running outside or inside Azure.

Workload Identity Federation can now be used with Azure DevOps Docker service connection targeting Azure Container Registry. This blog will explain how to use workload Identity with Azure DevOps Docker service connection.