Run Azure DevOps Private Agents in Kubernetes Clusters

Since in last post, we discussed on how to run Azure Pipelines agents as docker containers and configure them accordingly, the next step would be to run them on the Kubernetes platform. This kubernetes cluster can be on-premise and/or cloud and could be self managed or managed by the cloud service provider itself.

One of the reasons you may want to run them on Kubernetes is because you want better utilization of your kubernetes cluster. Another reason might be to leverage your existing knowledge of the kubernetes platform and work on it. Another reason would be to not use Microsoft hosted agents, as by default you would get only 1800 minutes of agent time to utilize, for free accounts.
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Store the app secrets in Azure Key Vault and use during Azure Pipelines

You can easily store your environment related secrets in the Azure Pipelines releases as variables and mark them as secrets which will encrypt and hide them. So anyone having access to the release definition would be not able to view them. Most of the times, it suffices as once set, they become encrypted and can not be viewed in text form.

However, sometimes it may happen that the person who keeps the secret would not be the same person as who is creating the release definition. Think of that as a way of segregating the responsibilities between the two. Also, it may be possible that the person who has provisioned the environment is not comfortable to share the secrets with anyone in plain text. After all, the best way to keep a secret is not to tell anyone about it. This is where the Azure Key Vault fits in very nicely. It can be used to store and transfer the secrets/certificates needed for your environment in a secure way.
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Troubleshooting ERROR: The subscription is not registered to use namespace ‘Microsoft.ContainerInstance’.

While trying to create the Azure Container Instances on one of the newly created Azure Subscription, we came across this strange error, “ERROR: The subscription is not registered to use namespace ‘Microsoft.ContainerInstance'”. So we checked our configuration and the way we were creating the Azure Containers, and it all seemed okay. So we dig a little around by using PowerShell, authenticate to Azure using Login-AzureRmAccount and fire few commands.

The first command we fired was classic Get-Command to check if there are any existing cmdlets to help with Azure Resources and sure enough, there it was:
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Configure Code Coverage for Dotnet Core 2.0 based applications using SonarQube and Azure DevOps

Using MSBuild tool to get code coverage and configure Azure DevOps pipelines to include code coverage results is an easy task for .NET framework based applications. Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS) contains inbuilt functionality to analyze code coverage files generated and publish results back to VSTS itself. However, it is quite a challenge to get it right and working for .NET Core 2.0 based applications. In this blog post, we’ll cover steps on how to get code coverage results for .NET Core based application using SonarQube and Azure DevOps. Continue reading “Configure Code Coverage for Dotnet Core 2.0 based applications using SonarQube and Azure DevOps” →

Fail Azure DevOps pipeline if build fail to pass the SonarQube Quality Gate

Using SonarQube extesions from Marketplace for Azure DevOps provides much of the integration functionality between Azure DevOps and SonarQube. Once the build pipeline completes, you can login in SonarQube server and view the code analysis results. Based on the code analysis results against the Quality threshold set or default Quality Gate threshold, it will be assigned a rating. However, there is no way to stop check-in of code, if it fails to passes the Quality Gate criteria. However, we can use some PowerShell and SonarQube Web APIs to do this part for us. In this blog post, we’ll learn steps to do the same. Continue reading “Fail Azure DevOps pipeline if build fail to pass the SonarQube Quality Gate” →