Docker

If you are doing any work related to containers and Azure, you are most likely using Azure Container Registry for storing images. The amoun of storage available for these images depends on the pricing tier you are using. If you exceed this amount of storage, you will pay an additional fee for every GB of image data that exceeds the limit. See the table below for the current pricing details. Azure Container Registry pricing details ...

Visual Studio has for quite some time been adding features to make it easier to create, build, run and debug Dockerized applications. This is great, because Docker can be quite daunting when you intially approach it and anything that makes that journey easier should be encouraged. However, with this tooling support comes some magic that is performed behind the scene when you hit F5 in Visual Studio. I have on numerous different occasions explained to developers what actually happens when you build and debug a Dockerized application in Visual Studio. With this post, I can send them here instead the next time 🙂 ...

Many of us have eagerly been waiting for the announcement that Microsoft made at the Build 2019 conference, Windows Containers is now in public preview in Azure Kubernetes Service! Yes, it’s in preview so we still have to wait before putting applications into production but it is definitely time to start planning and testing migrations of your Windows applications to AKS, such as full .NET Framework apps. Containers on Windows are still not as mature as on Linux of course, but they are fully supported on Windows and it is now GA on Kubernetes since version 1.14. ...

In a previous post I talked about how to create a build environment, including an Azure DevOps build agent, using Docker and Windows Containers. Using Dockerfiles, we can specify everything that we need in order to build and test our projects. Docker gives us Infrastructure as Code (no more snowflake build servers) and isolation which makes it easy to spin up multiple agents quickly on one or more machines without interfering with each other. ...

I’ve recently given talks at conferences and user groups on the topic of using Docker as a build engine, describing the builds using a Dockerfile. This has several advantages, such as fully consistent build no matter where you run it, no dependencies necessary except Docker. Some things become a bit tricker though, I’ve blogged previously about how to run unit tests in a Docker build, including getting the test results out of the build container afterwards. ...

Having automated builds that are stable and predictable is so important in order to succeed with CI/CD. One important practice to enable this is to have a fully scriptable build environment that lets you deploy multiple, identical, build envionment hosts. This can be done by using image tooling such as Packer from HahsiCorp. Another option is to use Docker which is what I am using in this post. Using Docker will will crete a Dockerfile that specifies the content of the image in which builds will run. This image should contain the SDK’s and tooling necessary to build and test your projects. It will also contain the build agent for your favourite CI server that will let you spin up a new agent in seconds using the docker image. ...