Easily Navigate Large Azure DevOps Pipelines

When an Azure DevOps pipeline contains hundreds of stages, navigating the pipeline UI can become challenging for several reasons.

• * Finding a specific stage among hundreds can be difficult.
• * Extensive horizontal and vertical scrolling is often required.
• * Failed stages are harder to identify in a large pipeline.
• * Navigation more difficult for users.

To address these challenges, Azure DevOps has introduced a new feature that makes navigating large pipelines much easier.

Prerequisites:

An Azure DevOps pipeline with multiple stages.

Creating and Testing Ingest Pipelines with Grok for NGINX Logs in Elasticsearch

The Elastic Stack is widely used for log management, monitoring, analytics, and observability. It includes several tools such as Beats, which collect logs from various systems. However, not all data in these logs is necessary for indexing. To filter, transform, and enrich documents before they are indexed, we can use ingest pipelines. In this blog, we will discuss how to create a simple ingest pipeline and test it.

Enabling Manual Triggers for Azure DevOps Pipeline Stages

Azure DevOps pipeline stages now support manual triggers, allowing for more flexibility. There are situations where some stages of a pipeline should run automatically, while others may require manual intervention. This blog explains how to configure a manual trigger for Azure DevOps pipeline stages.

Pre-requisites: Azure DevOps YAML Pipeline

To enable a manual trigger for a specific stage, include the trigger: manual option in the pipeline's YAML definition. Below is an example pipeline demonstrating how to configure a manual trigger for a stage.

Multi configuration build with GitHub Action Matrices

Testing is a crucial part of software development, and there are several kinds of testing performed by software development teams. Configuration testing is one type of testing that verifies the performance of a system under different configurations. This blog explains how to use GitHub Actions Matrices to build the code with different configurations.

GitHub actions matrices allow to use of variables in a single job definition to create multiple jobs with different configurations. 

Scan Code in Azure DevOps Build Pipelines Using Microsoft Security DevOps

Static code analysis is a mechanism to find and fix security vulnerabilities in source code without running the software. This blog explains how to integrate Microsoft Security DevOps to a build pipeline, which installs and configures static code analysis tools against your source code.

Pre-requisites: 

• Azure DevOps build pipeline
• Build agent which has .NET 6 (for MicrosoftSecurityDevOps build task) and NET 3.1 (CredScan analyzer) installed.

Resolve Chef Kitchen Verify Error "Cannot converge without accepting the Chef Infra Client License"

You might have experienced, Azure pipeline failing from kitchen verify step due to Chef Infra client License not accepted error while  creating a Chef test kitchen in Azure. Let's look at how to fix this issue in this post.

Creating Chef Test Kitchen in Azure Using Azure Pipelines

When you are working with Chef, you can use chef’s integrated testing framework to test recipes to ensures recipes run as expected before applying recipes to production. This blog explains how to configure, chef test kitchen in an Azure VM using Azure DevOps pipeline.

Resolve "Kitchen.yml does not exist" Issue in Azure Pipelines with Execute Chef Component Task

You might encounter "kitchen.yml does not exist" issue with execute chef component task in Azure pipelines. Reason for this failure is, Azure DevOps pipeline task is looking for the kitchen.yml file in the Build.SourcesDirectory by default. Further, there is no parameter to pass the kitchen.yml file location with kitchen create command.