It’s been a while since I last posted. On November last year I decided to take on a project in pure Waterfall, and from a developer point of view, the problem of Waterfall is because of the nature of the cycles, you never really build something cool or good, you’re always trying to deliver instead of building. So you get stuck into this delivery cycle and you’re not really accomplishing anything good and worth writing for.
That is behind now and I’m now back to Agile working in a DevOps team doing automation for a .Net programme. The development work I will be doing will be fully open sourced.
So far I have been working on a single TFS build workflow activity that scales Azure VMs up and down depending on what you want to do with it. For us, we want to scale down development environments during the night and during the weekend, but not completely shut them down so that we can still do continuous deployments during nightly builds. Reducing the VMs down to A1’s, or even A0’s will save a lot of money as environments ramp up during the development cycle.
The home for these TFS build activities is:
https://github.com/sfa-gov-uk/devopsflex
And they are already published to NuGet:
https://www.nuget.org/packages/DevOpsFlex.Activities/
I have a couple more things I want to do with this activity:
- Add a nice WPF designer to the activity.
- Add the ability to shutdown and start VMs instead of up scaling and down scaling.
- Add the ability to wait for the VMs to be back up before you exit the activity execution cycle. This allows developers to track the TFS build for when the environment is back up fully functional and if they are tracking TFS builds they will get notifications for it.
David Rodrigues Blog 