Jan 20 2019 — If you create Heroku apps, you know that the only built-in options for deployment are 1) the Heroku CLI or 2) integration with a github repo. If you don’t want your application’s code to be publicly accessible, this results in a tedious routine of manually pushing your changes to Heroku. With Azure DevOps, you can create flexible build pipelines to automate various tasks: running tests, creating binaries, publishing artifacts, etc. In this post, I will go through the steps to create a simple build pipeline that automatically pushes the latest code to Heroku when changes are committed to a Azure DevOps repo.

Mar 30 2018 — Packer is an open source tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer is lightweight, runs on every major operating system, and is highly performant, creating machine images for multiple platforms in parallel. In this post, I will demonstrate how to create a packer template for AWS that automatically installs and configures NGINX on the most recent Ubuntu OS.

Mar 22 2018 — When I began learning about DevOps software and processes, it seemed like there were numerous tools that accomplished the same task, or nearly the same task without a clear consensus opinion on the best toolchain and workflow. I quickly discovered that there isn’t a single, correct answer, mostly due to the nature of open-source software. The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools is a crowdsourced website that nicely illustrates the current landscape.

Mar 16 2018 — Have you ever wondered what is the correct way to determine either the local or public IP address of your PC? In this post, I explore various methods using built-in classes from the .NET Core framework. I attempt to determine my public/private IP address without the assistance of an external service, in order to eliminate any dependencies.