Consulting
Work Tracking
Work tracking and management is part of the day-to-day DevOps business. We share your knowledge on how to use Azure boards to the fullest, no matter if you want to manage your backlog, execute sprints or visualize your work and results in Azure.
We teach 1:1 and (virtual) classrooms up to ten people. Experience has shown to us that this amount of people leads to the best results. We would advise splitting bigger teams into multiple classes, so there is room to help and answer questions on an individual level.
Azure DevOps Migration (AzDO Server to AzDO Services)
You are not sure about migrating to DevOps? Or, does your organization has a complicated process with various services and systems of all kinds? In our prior work experience, we already helped companies like the UniCredit Bulbank Bulgaria or Länsförsäkringar Bank Stockholm moving from agile environments to the complete DevOps lifecycle, transforming processes, people and organizational structure on this journey.
There are many good reasons to migrate: simplified administration, that Azure DevOps is accessible from anywhere or leveraging the advantage of many other developer services in the Microsoft Cloud. Automatically upgrading to the latest features every three weeks is one of the most significant benefits.
We are here to guide you through the complete migration from start to import, covering topics like:
choosing the datacenter
how to implement Active Directory into Azure Active Directory
checking compliance
upgrades
validating your server
assign, activate and map Azure DevOps Service subscriptions
import in Azure DevOps Service
Team Foundation Server Migration (TFS to AzDO Services)
We also provide this migration. See “Azure DevOps Migration (AzDO Server to AzDO Services)” above for more details.
DevOps? Transformation?
When is the moment to switch to DevOps? Is it a matter of company size?
No. It is about the people and their culture, and not about the company size. More than often, DevOps is seen as a digital transformation in an organization. So at first, your people should be willing to go through this transformation – together. DevOps is a collaborative approach to build, test, deploy and deliver software. Continuously. Think of an assembly line. Also, DevOps is a state of mind. If you are not sure about this, we will have a look at your process, your employees and your organizational structure to find the right solution for your current state and also for the future.
Further reading:
DevOps for doubters: How to deal with 9 kinds of people who push back
What team structure is right for DevOps to flourish?
DevTest Labs (Infrastructure as Code)
We all know how time-consuming and complicated it can be to create test settings, including getting the resources for it. Developers in bigger organization requests environments from IT infrastructure teams, and more than often have to wait weeks or even months to get the desired resources. That leads to decreased developer productivity and motivation plus higher infrastructure costs and longer infrastructure wait time. Thankfully, with Azure DevTest Labs, all these issues are tackled – it provides fast, easy-to-access and lean DevTest environments for your team, on-demand. Consider Azure DevTest Lab as a self-serving sandbox environment.
Developers need flexibility, the infrastructure team is concerned about security and the project owner has to keep the cost low. Those are competing interests. We are experienced with this scenario and teach you how to solve all these challenges with DevTest Lab.
Moreover:
how to integrate a DevTest environment with your existing toolchain.
how to create powerful virtual machines including automated updates
how to manage your virtual machines and artifacts
how to automate startup and shutdown of these environments to control costs
capture and share DevTest Labs template with everyone
The importance of a CI/CD pipeline should be evident to everyone involved in software development nowadays – CI and CD are the backbones of the modern DevOps environment.
If you are new to this concept, we show how to get started with Azure Pipelines from the very beginning. Development and operations always go side by side. When it comes to operations, things like process automation, configuration management, and update management are prevalent challenges that you will be facing. We will pass our experience of overcoming these obstacles to you and develop your skills to handle this most efficiently.
CI/CD (Build & Release Automation)
Inspired by the spread of open source software, companies are using the practices of the powerful open source movement to create an internal company collaboration, also known as InnerSource.
It’s been used to help to increase innovation, adding quality, increasing code reuse, spreading full-stack knowledge across organizations or removing simple bottlenecks because of excessive silos. It can be applied to a lot of different problems and almost always results in much happier and motivated employees.
As you might guess, Azure is perfectly prepared for InnerSource – features like Azure Boards, Pipelines, Repos and Artifacts support open collaboration and open communication. We are here to get you and your team started into this encouraging and promising new chapter of software development.
Find more information on this topic here
Like the DevOps concept, DevSecOps is also a cultural shift in software development. It’s about introducing security earlier in the life cycle of application development. That reduces vulnerabilities and brings security closer to IT and business objectives. Other benefits are observability, traceability, confidence and compliance.
We help and advise your organization that security testing is fully integrated into your CI /CD pipeline along with other best DevSecOps practices.
One of the great features of Azure is autoscale – scaling according to the demands of the application usage. You can scale up or down on demand, which is great when there are only certain peak times of usage. And all of this happens on-the-fly, so you don’t need to take the application or service down to apply that.
Autoscale also eases management overhead by reducing the need for an administrator who continuously monitors an application or systems performance.
We provide your team with all you need to know about Azure autoscaling like:
– planning autoscale: key autoscaling considerations
– Microsoft Azure autoscale strategy
– configuring autoscale for Azure the right way
– autoscaling in conjunction with Azure Monitor and Azure Functions
Azure offers a variety of services that together provide a comprehensive solution for collecting, analyzing and reporting data from your applications. These services are Azure Monitor, Azure Service Health, Azure Advisor and Azure Security Center. These offerings can be overwhelming,
especially when you are at the beginning. Well, don’t worry. We will tell you exactly what service does what, and, more importantly – which service(s) you really need and how to set them up. You won’t miss a thing. Ever.
