Marcus' Blog

The semantic versioning used in all of our TFS/VSTS CI builds uses the predefined variable Build.BuildID for the buildnumber portion of major.minor.revision.buildnumber. The build id is used so we have traceability when troubleshooting. We can easily search for the build and see the associated changes. Major.minor.revision is set in a... [Read More]

I recently set out to automate the creation of our Windows build servers that run VSTS agents. Previously the build servers were thought of as “snowflake” servers because of all the software components and customization’s that were needed. This was even more reason to use Infrastructure as Code to get... [Read More]

In order to gracefully deploy releases to our application servers, I wanted to utilize rolling deployments in Octopus Deploy. If you aren’t familiar, rolling deployments slowly roll out a release one instance at a time (vs. all instances at once). The goal of this being reduced overall downtime. To accomplish... [Read More]

Last week Microsoft announced “Pipeline as code (YAML)” giving us the ability to store our builds in source control. This allows us to take advantage of Configuration as Code as well as other benefits not available through the Visual Designer builds: [Read More]

My team wanted the ability to populate test data into new data warehouse instances (MySQL on Linux) that are created via Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation and Chef). They already had the SQL scripts they used for local development, so I would just need to setup a process to package and... [Read More]