Moving, Bad Luck in August and Ask Me Anything

[@sebastians3773]

Great to see you're okay! Good video as usual, I'm going to have to have a look at those repositories you've posted and do some learning. Also, I asked on an earlier video about getting into DevOps from ITOps to which you replied with encouragement, so I'd like to at least report back that I did indeed get a DevOps Engineer position focused on Azure + Terraform! For those of you out there looking to move from IT to DevOps, it's totally possible and there isn't as much of a barrier as I think many expect, just don't say "no" to yourself by not applying at all, if it that makes sense.

[@JulieNgTech]

CONGRATULATIONS!!! 🎉 that's awesome! I'm glad you got a role you wanted. I'm looking forward to hearing how you find the new role and what kinds of tech challenges come up, which are IMO always fun to poke around and solve. Congrats again Sebastian!

[@MikeDunphy]

Woah, wasn't expecting an "in-person" answer. Thanks, Julie! Great video as always!

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks Mike! I hope the answer was okay and understandable. I'm not sure how I feel about soundbite answers yet 🙃

[@karsegri]

All you content is helping me a lot! Thanks Julie!

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks for the feedback Karen! I always love seeing another woman in tech. Let me know if there's anything you want me to cover. I'll prioritize it :)

[@kevball21]

Thanks for answers and reference links! The deployment question pertained to including Infra as part of the CD stages of the pipeline (Build app x, deploy Infra for X). Using Bicep to deploy the infrastructure and trying to decide if the IaC should be its own pipeline (as you mentioned IaC doesn't need to run often). Currently the pipeline has template for bicep build, deploy and what-if stages/jobs/tasks the run based on the environment and region. Since the Infra templates can re-run without effecting the deployed infra, the deploy task just runs with the app deployment each time. There is a what-if stage that runs for PRs that should catch changes made to IaC (but not direct environment branch pushes yet) so users should get a drift report like what you used in your governance demo in GitHub. I have been trying to keep everything in one pipeline but starting feel like it is getting overly complex! Thanks again for taking the time to answer questions and talk with us about DevOps!

[@JulieNgTech]

Have you thought about keeping your infra as code templates in a separate folder so that you can have separate pipelines for app vs infra by using separate triggers? Also separating pipelines creates a security boundary for your since Infra as Code usually runs with a privileged user, that I wouldn't necessarily give apps access to. Although the iac _usually_ doesn't re-run if nothing changes, you do have to be careful if someone is making changes in the portal or via CLI, in which case the configuration management aspect of IaC might kick in and undo those external changes. Whether that's good, e.g. (remove config drift) or bad (oops, removed production fix) depends on your workflow.

[@JulieNgTech]

Also re: "what-if" and conditional stages/jobs, you'll see that I prefer separate pipelines to better keep track of what is running when. In the ADO UI, I want to see if production deployment ran, and not see that a deployment pipeline ran and have to click into it to see if it was dev or production. Does that make sense? Asking because sometimes customers get confused when I say that and usually I have to demo it.

[@kevball21]

@@JulieNgTech Those are all good points for moving it to a separate pipeline. It would also make it easier to conditionally run the related environment steps on a PR to that environment. I was trying to stick with a single pipeline per app tier to keep the number of pipelines smaller. After going down the rabbit hole of trying to get everything working in a single pipeline and your points on security, I will test out having the infra in a separate pipeline. Everything is in templates any so should not be too hard to test out. Thanks again for the feedback and excellent videos. Enjoy your vacation!

[@JulieNgTech]

@@kevball21 awesome, let me know how it goes :) and if you go back to a single pipeline, I'd be really curious why :)

[@erickvidbaz3086]

you forgot mine

[@JulieNgTech]

Hey Erick, I'm so sorry! I blew through the Comments tool in KZbin Studio too quickly and was sure I missed some. What was your question? Let me know and I will try to answer here :)

[@kiranraj-dw5gq]

Wow was waiting for your videos.Thats like bad luck fell in love with u 😂😂 . Julie I do have a question - I have always used windows OS for any coding ( more of a windows powershell and now terraform user) but have seen many dev guys use mac . May I know why you prefer a Mac over a Windows OS ?

[@JulieNgTech]

I've used a mac since 2003 and am way more comfortable with it. Of course I tried switching to Windows when I joined Microsoft. I even spent a lot of time customizing the environment in WSL as much as I could to my mac. BUT ultimately it just felt so slow compared to the mac, esp. since Node.js has lots of tiny little files and the IO lag for being a subsystem just adds up over time. And version management for tooling was a pain. Nvm for Node.js just worked much better for me. And line breaks, encoding, etc (aarrgggghhh) drove me nuts as a pedantic coder viewing my own stuff in GitHub. That's my experience as an OSS developer. Many of my colleagues who come from the .NET world work with their Windows machines fine. Does that help answer your question?

[@kiranraj-dw5gq]

@@JulieNgTech thanks Julie that makes a lot of sense ,you really have the gift of explaining tech stuff in a clear easy way 😀. looking forward to more of your videos girl ❤️

[@cewa44]

What are best resources to learn azure pipelines? I have went through many courses but non are explaining pipeline like you, in-depth and with code. If there is any resource like that, it would be great!

[@JulieNgTech]

Thanks for the feedback. Unfortunately there aren't other resources that I know of, which is why I made the videos. I learned mostly by doing. If you have a project or idea, I recommend just building pipelines to find what works best for your workflow :)

[@aymanpatel5862]

Can you do a video on front-end UI deployment? I have noticed a lot of anti-patterns for UI deployment?

[@JulieNgTech]

Happy to look into it. What specific questions do you have about frontend deployments? And are you referring to standalone frontend (e.g. single page app) or as part Microservice architecture?

[@aymanpatel5862]

Microservices deployment could also be of great help.

[@JulieNgTech]

Microservices is quite a broad category. What specifically about it or deployment is challenging that you want a video? What are you looking for that maybe you have not found it other KZbin videos (all of KZbin, not just my few 🙃)? I'm asking because I am usually motivated to make videos if a) nobody has talked about it or b) I can do it better 😉 so help me understand what gaps there are for you. Thanks!

[@aymanpatel5862]

@@JulieNgTech Blue Green deployment or deployments which have zero-downtime for UI application.