Azure DevOps pipelines can benefit from using the Cache task to quickly store and retrieve dependencies. This can significantly reduce execution time for pipelines that are executed repeatedly within a 7 day period. This blog posts details how the task was added to a PowerShell module build pipeline to reduce the installation of pipeline dependencies from 3 minutes to 4 seconds.
The maximum validity of SSL/TLS certificates is being significantly reduced over the next few years, so there’s never been a better time to automate your certificate management. In Azure TLS certificates can be used in lots of different places, some of which are easier to manage than others. By 2029 TLS certificates will have a maximum lifetime of 47 days, so automation will be essential to ensure you can continue to keep services running without disruption.
PowerShell and Python are powerful programming languages with many similarities. While PowerShell is technically a shell scripting language (like Bash), functionally it has a lot more in common with Python, and can be used to generate scripts of equal complexity. As someone with a strong familiarity with PowerShell, I’m finding it useful as I learn Python to reference the equivalent concepts in PowerShell.
I was recently tasked with enabling connectivity to an Azure SQL database via the managed identity of a Logic App and it was surprisingly complicated to setup. In addition we wanted this configuration to be enabled through our automation pipelines, which added a further complexity. This blog post details the steps we had to take.
This blog post is part of the Azure Spring Clean 2025 virtual community event, promoting well-managed Azure tenants. In last year’s Azure Spring Clean, Dan Rios blogged about using PSRule for Bicep code. The focus of this blog post is on how you can use PSRule to validate Azure resources deployed via Terraform by HashiCorp.
There was a recent trend on Twitter/X where people were sharing whether they spent more time tweeting or coding, which you can discover for yourself through this tool. Apparently I spent 61% more time tweeting than coding (in public anyway), and while I was pondering whether or not that was a good thing, Doug Finke came to this excellent conclusion:
I recently migrated some Azure DevOps Classic Release deployment pipelines to YAML. There’s obvious benefits to storing your pipelines as code: they become an artifact in source control that can evolve and change as the code they build or deploy does, and you have the benefits of version history and maintaining the pipelines via pull requests. However I also found that I could use logic and expressions to make the pipelines more efficient and easier to maintain and that through templating could easily connect the pipelines together to form what I humorously dubbed the “super pipeline” (but ...
Should cloud computing be illegal? Probably not, but it is incredibly easy to get started, equally difficult to stop, and before you know it you could be selling your grandmother just to afford one more month of that delicious compute. Hopefully your circumstances never get that dire, but I’ve seen plenty of companies entrench themselves into the highly addictive world of automated, scalable infrastructure, but then struggle to understand the often-astronomical monthly bill.
