As MVPs, we participate of meetings with Microsoft to provide feedback or to learn about some upcoming new product delivery. This is one of the finest opportunities of being an MVP: to be at the cutting edge of Microsoft technologies.
In October there was an internal MVP meeting with Microsoft on DevOps with Azure. Without going into the specifics, which are under NDA, I want to bring that this one caught me by surprise. When I got the invite, I only looked at the meeting title “Azure DevOps OSS + Q&A with Arun Chandrasekhar”, and took for granted it was about OSS VSTS integrations with Azure: nothing new for me as I have been doing this for while.
However I was blown away by Arun’s presentation: it was about how to do DevOps with OSS tooling, especially Jenkins and Terraform. At my previous job I had worked extensively with Jenkins, including being able to be one of the architects of a build infrastructure that ended up being used by a couple thousand developers.
What I was not aware though, and Arun’s presentation helped me correct that gap, was that there is an extensive set of existing integrations with Jenkins for Azure, including Azure VM Agents, and an Azure-ready VM for Jenkins among others:
To see a couple of those as demos, I recommend watching the two videos from Arun with Donovan Brown:
And the video from Jenkins World 2017 presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buQNF1sekq8
There is an entire world of possibilities to be explored, such as Azure DevOps Solution Architectures that are based on Jenkins and OSS:
Given my previous interest and work with Jenkins I will be learning a lot after delving into those references. In conclusion: it’s always good when something forces you to step out of your comfort zone, and meeting Arun has definitely been a great opportunity.