Accelerating DevOps with the Cloud using Microsoft Azure and Friends: The Series

UPDATE! Today's article in this series is ...

ADDED: New resources in Configuration Management section below for Puppet, Chef, Vagrant, Ansible and Docker based on popular requests. Feel free to suggest your own updates if you see any missing topics!

Bookmark this page and catch all the prior articles in this series, too! They're all linked in the series index below.

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Have you heard about DevOps?

Enterprise IT organizations are increasingly driven by business demands for faster, better solutions delivered more quickly than ever before.  Over the past few years, DevOps has emerged as a trend to help organizations evolve to better collaborate between development and operations teams for addressing these solution delivery challenges.  While a DevOps transformation can take time to fully realize within an organization’s people and processes, there’s opportunities to accelerate the path towards DevOps by smartly leveraging cloud capabilities that can reduce infrastructure complexity, simplify release management, and support end-to-end application visibility through all stages of a solution’s lifecycle.

Step-by-Step: Follow us to DevOps with the Cloud

Over the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing a series of articles aimed at showcasing examples of leveraging relevant cloud technologies, such as Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio Online, that encourage a DevOps mission within an organization.  Along the way in this series, we’ll provide real-world step-by-step guidance for using these capabilities so that you can easily follow along with us in your own cloud-based lab.

Wait! Did you say Visual Studio? I’m not a developer!

Visual Studio Online is not just for developers – it provides value to the entire solution delivery team, including both IT Pros and Developers.  Together with Microsoft Azure, Visual Studio Online promotes a consistent, cloud-enabled approach to delivering reliable enterprise solutions throughout all development and operations phases.

Build your Cloud-based Lab

To prepare your cloud lab environment for following along with us, you’ll need to activate a couple subscriptions … luckily, you can get started with everything for FREE!

• DO IT: Activate a FREE Microsoft Azure cloud platform subscription
   
• DO IT: Activate a FREE Visual Studio Online subscription

Are you ready? Let’s go …

Be sure to bookmark this page and check back daily … as each article is published, we’ll be sure to link it back to this index so that you don’t miss out on any articles.

1. Series Introduction (this article)
    

2. WATCH: What is "DevOps" and Why Is It Important to IT Pros?
    

   1. What is “DevOps” all about?
       
   2. Is DevOps a new role in IT?
       

3. WATCH: DevOps: An IT Pro Guide

4. WATCH: How does Microsoft Azure and the Cloud align with DevOps?
    

   1. What's the value of DevOps to Enterprise IT?
       
   2. DECK: Accelerating DevOps in the Cloud
       

5. WATCH: The New Azure Portal
    

   1. Building your Dream DevOps Dashboard with the new Azure Preview Portal
       

6. WATCH: Enabling Self-Service On-Demand Developer Environments in the Cloud
    

   1. STEP-BY-STEP: Enabling Self-Service, On-Demand Provisioning of Dev/Test Environments
       
   2. Managing On-Demand Hybrid Clouds with System Center 2012 R2 App Controller
       
   3. STEP-BY-STEP: Getting Started with On-Demand Private Clouds using Windows Azure Pack
       

7. WATCH: Source Control in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure & Visual Studio Online
    

   1. Source Control in the Cloud
       

8. WATCH: Testing in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure & Visual Studio Online
    

   1. STEP-BY-STEP: Continuous Delivery in the Cloud with Microsoft Azure and Visual Studio
       

9. WATCH: Automating for Predictability
    

   1. DevOps, Automation and Cloud Computing
       
   2. STEP-BY-STEP: Step-by-Step: Orchestrating the Cloud with Azure Automation
       

10. WATCH: Configuration Management in the Cloud

    1. STEP-BY-STEP: Enabling Configuration Management in the Cloud with PowerShell DSC
        
    2. STEP-BY-STEP: PowerShell DSC for Linux
    3. WATCH: Using Vagrant and Puppet to manage your Development Environment
    4. WATCH: Puppet and Azure - Bringing DevOps to the Enterprise
    5. STEP-BY-STEP: Deploying Puppet Enterprise in Microsoft Azure
    6. WATCH: Using Vagrant and Chef to manage your Development Environment
        
    7. STEP-BY-STEP: Hands-free Configuration of Microsoft Azure VM's using Chef
        
    8. STEP-BY-STEP: Quick Start with the Vagrant Azure Provider 
        
    9. STEP-BY-STEP: Introduction to Windows Support with Ansible
        
    10. STEP-BY-STEP: Getting started with Docker on Microsoft Azure
         
    11. STEP-BY-STEP: Provision Docker via PowerShell DSC

     

11. Introducing Agile Application Delivery with Azure RemoteApp
     

    1. STEP-BY-STEP: Deploying Azure RemoteApp as a Cloud Service 
        
    2. STEP-BY-STEP: How to create a hybrid deployment of RemoteApp
        

12. WATCH: Rollback plan? What Rollback plan?
     

    1. STEP-BY-STEP: Staged Deployment on Microsoft Azure Web Sites
    2. STEP-BY-STEP: Continuous Delivery to Azure Using Visual Studio Online
        

13. WATCH: Scaling and Auto-scaling Cloud Applications – Up or Out?
    

    1. STEP-BY-STEP: Configure a Load-Balanced Set
    2. STEP-BY-STEP: Implementing Internal Load Balancing in Microsoft Azure
        
    3. STEP-BY-STEP: How to Scale a Cloud Application
        

14. Introducing Azure Files for Shared Folders in the Cloud

    1. STEP-BY-STEP: Implementing Azure Files 

15. WATCH: Monitoring, Measuring and Learning for Continuous Improvement

    1. STEP-BY-STEP: Monitoring, Measuring and Learning for Continuous Improvement

If there’s additional topics you’d like to see, feel free to suggest them in the comments area below.  Like any agile project, we will consider your requests and may assign some sprints to get them added to our scope.