Did you know that you can run your Azure DevOps pipeline jobs in a container? It’s a great way to combine the benefits of Microsoft Hosted Agents and Self-Hosted Agents. In this post, I will explain what Azure DevOps Container Jobs are and how you can use them to your advantage. But first, a recap of Microsoft Hosted Agents and Self-Hosted Agents.

What are Microsoft Hosted Agents

Microsoft Hosted Agents are a type of agent in Azure DevOps that are hosted and managed by Microsoft. These agents are pre-configured with certain software depending upon the type of agent (Windows, macOS, or Linux) which can run jobs targeting different platforms. With Microsoft Hosted Agents you trade off control for convenience as they are an excellent choice if you need to quickly scale your operations without worrying about the underlying infrastructure management.

Next to the Get-Command and hte Get-Help cmdlets, there are 3 other cmdlets that are essential for any PowerShell user. In this blog post I will explain my view on why they are essential and provide hands-on examples on how to use them.

Unveiling Object Properties and Methods with Get-Member

The official documentation states: The Get-Member cmdlet gets the members, the properties and methods, of objects. Making it the Swiss army knife for exploring the properties and methods of any object in PowerShell and thus indispensable for any PowerShell user.

With this post I want to share my new GitHub repository -> Starter Kit for an Azure IaC repository . This starter kit is based on best practices, personal experiences, and guidelines for creating and organizing code and resources tailored for Azure infrastructure deployment. While the example itself is based on a combination of Azure DevOps, Bicep and PowerShell, the concepts are applicable to any IaC language and tool combination.

In this post I will share a couple of tips with regards to Secrets Management in your (local) dev environment. Personally I use these to prevent / limit leaking of secrets while developing Azure infrastructure. And I consider them as part of my security hygiene during the development process.

Last year I wrote a series of posts covering the naming convention topic. The perfect azure naming convention covered the Azure resources. The primary concept for this naming convention is that in fact Azure resource names are actually ID’s which cannot be renamed. In this post I want to share a method with which renamable display names can be added.

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework is a comprehensive set of guidelines, best practices, tools, and documentation. But, this comprehensiveness can render the framework complex and potentially overwhelming for individuals and organizations, most notably for those with limited cloud expertise. As an attempt to offset the complexity I created a ready to use quick start backlog for the Design Areas sub-section of the Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework . Via this blog post I want to share it, explain the composition and guide you on how import it into your own Azure DevOps organization within minutes.

In the previous post Sleep Worry-Free: The best tips for Local Secrets Management I shared the best tips for managing local secrets. In this post I will take Secrets Management to the next level by showing you how to create manage and use secrets securely by setting up a local secure store using PowerShell SecretManagement and PowerShell SecretStore modules.

Modules explained

Since this approach to Secrets Management depends on the two just mentioned modules the purpose of each of the modules is explained next.