Ok so today saw the climax of an intensive few days of Azure DevOps learning via the medium of an Open Hack.

It’s my very first Open Hack but I really hope it won’t be my last.

Such a fantastic format for learning and developing of understandings with hands on tasks and challenges where you team up with like minded individuals and put your skills and knowledge to the test in the best way you can to complete a set of increasingly complex challenges.

I was one of three people in my team as well as a Microsoft employee acting as our team mentor/coach. Their role being to keep you close to the guide rails but allow you to go off piste at times all in the interests of learning through doing.

I won’t discuss the challenges on this blog post, but suffice to say I have learnt an absolute tonne of information and skills that I fully intend on putting to practice and taking back to my work.

I would highly recommend anyone to attend an Open Hack if they get the opportunity. For me, this Open Hack has been specifically about demystifying Azure DevOps and what it has to offer the Development lifecycle, including Continuous Integration as well as Continuous Delivery. I even managed to work my way through deploying a bunch of Containerised API’s into an Azure Web App Production Slot and implement relevant pipelines to configure Continuous Deployment! Then not just that, but configure my deployment to run through a series of code unit and integration tests as well as utilise Logic Apps and Monitor Alerts/Actions to auto deploy and roll back in the event of an issue with the deployment!

A great chance ot flex my DevOps muscles which I fully intend on exploring in context with Infrastructure as Code deployments utilising Terraform!

Oh and how cool was my previous post about Satya Nadella joining our call?!!!! I’m still in a state of shock!

OpenHack: DevOps

Issued by Microsoft OpenHackAuthorized by Microsoft Earners of the OpenHack: DevOps badge have fundamental understanding of the DevOps practices required to achieve zero downtime deployment of containerized micro-services running in Azure. The scenario is a real-world simulation focused on DevOps practices including Continuous Integration, Testing, Delivery, Monitoring and Alerting. Participants improve delivery velocity and release quality while minimizing downtime using DevOps tools including but not limited to GitHub, Azure DevOps and Jenkins.

100DaysOfCloud Overview

My Main ReadMe Page is all set up with a bit about me!

The guys at 100DaysofCloud have set up the GitHub repo to be cloned and also have a great repo containing ideas and areas to collaborate on: https://github.com/100DaysOfCloud/100DaysOfCloudIdeas

My Github Journey tracker can be found here: https://github.com/jonnychipz/100DaysOfCloud

Please Watch/Star my repo and feel free to comment of contribute to anything I push! I really look forward to hearing from anyone who is going to jump on the journey around the same time as me! Lets see where I get to in 100 days!

I would encourage others to jump on this journey, I’m not sure that I will be able to commit every day for 100 days, but as long as I can complete 100 days that will be great!