How to Continuously Deploy a Heroku App with Azure DevOps

How to Continuously Deploy a Heroku App with Azure DevOps

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.

Packer Template: Amazon EC2 Ubuntu AMI with Latest NGINX

Packer Template: Amazon EC2 Ubuntu AMI with Latest NGINX

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.

The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools

The Periodic Table of DevOps Tools

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.

Network Utility Methods Part 2: Retrieving Local and Public IP Addresses

Network Utility Methods Part 2: Retrieving Local and Public IP Addresses

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.