Today, we will touch on how Microsoft releases changes globally across the Microsoft Azure ecosystem. It always amazes me how Microsoft can release changes daily across Azure without customers noticing (the majority of the time), yet they benefit from new capabilities swiftly.

Microsoft has implemented several quality stages for Azure, and they are continuously enhancing platform automation and processes to ensure Azure service changes have zero impact on customer workloads. Let's take a look at how Microsoft is achieving this.

Would you like to know how Azure releases changes to Production while maintaining high Quality and Agility? Azure implements hundreds of changes daily without customers noticing, yet they benefit from new capabilities swiftly. You can learn about the quality stages for Azure and how they are learning to help ensure Microsoft continuously enhances platform automation and processes to ensure Azure service changes have zero impact on customer workloads.

The Azure Developer CLI (azd) is an open-source tool that accelerates provisioning and deploying app resources on Azure, it is great for deploying resources quickly and easily - especially in a proof of concept, or rapid innovation scenario.

One of the resources you can deploy (both Infrastructure and Application) is a Azure Static Web App recently, I ran into an issue where I was deploying a backend Azure Function, and I needed a react web application front end hosted on the Azure Static WebApp to pull the function app URL and function key from the runtime environment variables, and quickly realized that React does not support runtime environment variables - only build-time environment variables.

Today, we will implement a Terraform bootstrap script that will install Terraform and create directories where we can place our Terraform project, which will then run a plan against and deploy. This script will be written in PowerShell to bootstrap a new Terraform project.

"Bootstrapping usually refers to a self-starting process that is supposed to continue or grow without external input. Many analytical techniques are often called bootstrap methods in reference to their self-starting or self-supporting implementation" ~ Wikipedia.

PoC, PoT, Prototype, MVP, Pilot - what do they all mean? What is the difference between them, and when should you use them?

Today, we are going to take a look at a technical Cloud Product Development lifecycle - in my eyes, understanding these terminologies is key to determining:

• What kind of resources (i.e., both technological and human) do you need to dedicate to a product?
• Where should you align lifecycle management with your application or service?
• How likely is it that the the product makes a good market fit or solves an issue?
• Keep your product lean to avoid wasting the wrong resources at the wrong time
• Shift to a product-based mindset
• Focus on innovation and early feedback loops

And, of course - what to expect when people start using these words, often thrown together in a conversation and sometimes even put in writing in Statement of Works and Requests for Proposals.

Pre-commit hooks are automated scripts or checks running before developers commit code to a repository. They are particularly useful in the context of infrastructure, such as code (IaC) development, when working with Terraform.

These hooks serve as an early defense against common issues, ensuring code quality and consistency before changes are committed to version control.

Today, we are going to discuss precommit with GitHub Codespaces.