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Use case for pipeline templates In the world of complex enterprise applications and distributed systems you may have a need to perform many more actions and validations as part of a build pipeline than before: build an application, execute multiple types of tests like unit tests and API tests, perform security validations like SCA, SAST, container image scanning and scanning of third-party dependencies, perform application packaging and deployment, etc. That's when it's worth considering to implement a multi-staged pipeline where you can run several jobs in parallel and control application flow with stages. Each stage may then have it's own set of checks and validations. You may even have multiple applications which have similar build tasks as part of the build pipeline - for instance, if you have multiple .NET Web API applications, it's very likely that build pipelines for those will be similar to some extent. ...

Introduction Sometimes things may go wrong, also during ugprade of the application that is deployed to a Kubernetes cluster with Helm. When something goes wrong, you fix it and re-try a deployment with the new fix included. But then deployment operation fails with following error message: Error: UPGRADE FAILED: another operation (install/upgrade/rollback) is in progress So, what does it mean and how can you fix it? Let’s find out! Controlled, manual fix This happens typically when Helm attempts to roll out a new revision of an application and then something goes wrong in the process, like a bug in an application itself or an issue inside the Kubernetes cluster, which causes the new deployment to never get completed. This faulty deployment becomes dangling, therefore preventing all the future deployments to be rolled out. You can easily check the latest deployment status by retrieving the history of application deployments with helm history. ...

In this blog post I would like to talk about Accelerated Networking, how it can improve internal communication inside an AKS cluster and how you can enable that for Linux and Windows AKS nodes. But first, let's get the basics straight. What is Accelerated Networking and why use it in AKS? Accelerated Networking (AN) is something that has been around in Azure for a few years now - I think I have read about it for the first time around 2018. Until recently this functionality has been mainly mentioned in terms of classic Azure VMs or Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS). It's not that long ago that the possibility for Accelerated Networking got introduced in Azure Kubernetes Service though, especially if we're talking about Windows nodes. When I tested this back in February 2022, support for AN in Windows nodes in AKS was still in private preview but fortunately, a few months later this has been included as part of standard AKS offering. Now, when you create an AKS cluster or a new node pool, be it Linux or Windows, Accelerated Networking will be enabled automatically for you. And this is a reason for celebration, my friend - you'll understand why when I show you the numbers!😼 ...

Welcome to Part 2 of blog post series on Continuous Delivery to Azure Kubernetes Service with Azure DevOps Environments! In Part 1 we looked into what Azure DevOps Environments are, what benefits they provide and how I would recommend to create ADO environments and resources based on my own experience. If you haven't read Part 1, you can check it out here: Continuous Delivery to AKS With Azure DevOps Environments - Part 1. ...

It’s time for a new edition of Kris’s Quick cup of Kubernetes where I’m utilizing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) for demo purposes!😺 In second edition of this tech tip series I would like to share a few tips related to CronJobs, Rolling Updates and AKS add-ons that can make your life easier when working with Kubernetes and specifically Azure Kubernetes Service. #1 - Run CronJob instantly Sometimes you may need to run a CronJob (scheduled Job) instantly, for example, when you’re debugging some execution errors. So, can you do that instantly or do you need to wait for the next time slot that the CronJob is scheduled for to execute? Well, you can pretty easily create a regular Job based on CronJob definition and in that way trigger it instantly - here’s how you can do that with kubectl: ...