Sunday, September 30, 2018

Azure Boards for DevOps

Azure Boards is provide a unique experience for the developers, managers and administrators to work collaboratively in one team. Users can create, manage and arrange your tasks and bugs with a higher degree of customization support. Users have the ability to decide the template for the project at the beginning of the project. While customized processes can also be defined along with custom entity types and statuses, set of features supported by default are very helpful for most of the times. 


Work items

You can define custom work item types in the project configuration. Also there are custom work item states can be defined based on the entity type. Further, the work items tab, which shows information as a table is very much customizable with the columns of the user choices. 

When you open a work item, you can see a default set of fields such as the title, assignee and status. Then the lower area of a work item is tabbed into different areas based on the need. 



Boards

A newly created project through DevOps always created with pre-configured template that to manage the flow of the work. You can configuire those templates under Organization Settings. These boards are highly customizable and allows user to customize the views for each project. Boards support swim lanes, card customization, conditional formatting, filtering, and some more.



Backlogs

A backlog suggest whats left to do. Backlogs are managed in well defined structures that include user stories and features. 


  

Sprints

Sprints make it easy to manage the product releases and list the tasks that are assigned to each person in the team. When needed, a task can be assigned from the backlog to a devloper. Task board shows where each task is at with a number for each state. Task burn-down chart allows to show how the tasks are being completed with the time. These enable delivery of a development sprint to be more effective and can monitor effectively. 

Dashboards

Whenever someone wants to get an overall idea about the whole project an access the dashboard and it will show all the charts and comes complete with a rich canvas for creating dashboards. There are plenty of widget templates to choose and show the data for tracking progress. Charts, numbered views and various other graphics are there.



Queries

Query engine is so fast and so effective as it allows customizations to a greater extend. It allows user to measure what user exactly tracking, creating easy to monitor KPIs. Depending on the need of the week or sprint, different query views can be pinned to the dashboards.



Images are captured through Azure Blog.

Friday, September 28, 2018

Ethereum Proof-of-Authority for Blockchain on Azure

Microsoft already released a proof-of-work platform and it was popular so quickly and it was a great help to get feedback for their latest release Ethereal proof-of-authority.
The mechanism behind Ethereum is Sybil-resistant and it allows computation cost to be controlled and also allow fair participation. This mechanism is suggested to use in anonymous or open networks for security on the crypto currency competition. But when it comes to private networks or consortium networks, existing ether is not valuable. Proof of authority is more efficient because, no need to mine and Byzantine fault tolerance.

How it works


The theory is very simple. Each and every node will have a unique ID because it is important to keep alive the relative consensus nodes if a node goes down. Since high availability is a must in network, each node run multiple times to ensure high availability. By using Identity leasing system azure make sure that 2 or more nodes won’t have same ID at the same time. In a VM failure or regional outage new nodes can quickly get the existing Ids and start running.

Thursday, September 13, 2018

An Overview of Azure DevOps

Developers loved having VSTS as they had everything beginning from writing code to automating build deployment. Now we have Azure DevOps. Not just we have them now, your VSTS projects may be transferred to Azure DevOps soon. This means all the visualstudio.com domains will be migrated to dev.azure.com domains. Also it is likely that on-premises versions of TFS will also be called as Azure DevOps with next releases.

Azure DevOps is introduced to uprise the standards of developing software solutions with ease and reliability. Now you do not need to pay a third party company some extra money for maintaining your task views. They all can be done with Azure DevOps. 

Azure DevOps consists of attractive set of features that help manage work items easily. When I say work items, it does not has to be development work. I have tried with some administrative works as well. So far, a good choice for almost no price. 

Monday, September 10, 2018

Azure IOT Hub integration with Azure Event Grid

Couple of years ago Azure Released Azure IoT Hub based on Microsoft Azure to control and manage billions of devices, transferring data to the cloud to gain some business insights for their customers and the needs are growing rapidly. Now they have released IoT Hub integration with Azure Event Grid to simplify their customer needs. It will gain more insights into actions by simplifying the architecture of IoT solutions.

Advantages include:


  • Automating workflows with apps like Azure Functions and Azure Logic Apps is now easy with the event grid. Since they are serverless architectures, it works well with event hub. Even the user can downstream the processes.
  • Will always alert about the device status such as creation, deletion, connection, and disconnection of devices. And the response time is really quick.
  • It will always reduce the complexity expense of polling services. This is integrated with events, with 3rd party applications using webhooks such as ticketing, billing system, and database updates

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.3.0 provides Multi-member consortium support

Recently Azure Blockchain workbench has released and seems its popular now. The Happy News is the Azure Blockchain Workbench 1.3.0 has released with Multi-member consortium support. Users can now upgrade their deployments to 1.3.0 or either users can create a new instance of workbench. To upgrade you can use upgrade script that released by Microsoft.
Once upgrade following enhancements will be added
It is fast and more reliable
Microsoft always check their telemetry to identify issues that affect to their customers, and decided to made some changes to make deploying Workbench more reliable. And faster.
Transaction reliability is much better
Microsoft has made a massive improvement for monitoring in version 1.1.0 and there are reliability improvements to the DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) Watcher and DLT Consumer Microservices. The usual error message “It looks like something went wrong …” might appear.