Microsoft organized a series of free training events under the title “App Innovation Circle” in the last quarter of 2017. This was a multi-city event aimed at educating the Microsoft partner organizations with the latest offerings that could help them in advancing the way applications are built and delivered. The last part of the series was on DevOps with VSTS. I was quite fortunate enough to be a trainer for this session. This was a first time experience for me as trainer conducting a full day training sessions. Though I have been talking in various user groups/ meetups for the past couple of years, handling the entire crowd singlehandedly for a full day was a little daunting for me at first. But, I took up the challenge and signed up for being a trainer.
DevOps is definitely the industry buzzword. Every organization is trying to get on the DevOps bandwagon. This training was aimed at bootstrapping developers/operations teams to get familiarized with DevOps concepts and showcase how VSTS (Visual Studio Team services) makes the DevOps journey a breeze for anyone coming from any language, and any platform. Below are the high-level topics which were covered during the entire day.
- What is DevOps?
- What are the various DevOps practices?
- What is VSTS?
- Walkthrough of VSTS Portal
- Demo of Project planning using VSTS
- Hand on labs
- Creating a new account in VSTS
- Creating a new Team Project in VSTS
- Creating a new asp.net application in VS 2017
- Pushing the code to GIT in VSTS
- Setting up a continuous integration (CI) build for the asp.net web application
- Creating a new Azure Web App from Azure portal
- Setting up a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline for deploying the asp.net web application into Azure App Service
- Automating the Azure Deployment slots swapping from VSTS release
- Demo of Azure DevOps project
Due to overwhelming registrations, the event was planned to be conducted in two venues in parallel inside Microsoft campus in Bengaluru. The venue I was handling had a turnout of about 75+ participants. The first half of the day was spent in level setting everyone on DevOps concepts and getting everyone familiar with VSTS. Second half was well spent in getting everyone’s hands dirty with VSTS, Azure and Visual Studio 2017. Due to the diverse nature of the participants, we couldn’t complete everything I had planned for. But the participants were highly interactive and very engaging.
The slides used in the session can be found at
Step by Step instructions used in the hands-on labs can be found at https://github.com/svswaminathan/aic-devops-hol
Looking forward to conducting more engaging training in 2018 🙂
Swaminathan Vetri 