Jeffrey Opdam on Azure DevOps with AWS - Episode 74

Today's guest is Jeffrey Opdam, an ALM Ranger, which is a recognized group related to the Azure DevOps Product Team at Microsoft. Jeffrey loves doing crazy continuous delivery stuff with TFS, VSTS, Azure DevOps — including coaching. He also loves DDD and CQRS and does Software Architect integrated with DevOps. But, most importantly, he's a proud dad!

In this episode, Jeffrey is speaking on the topic of Azure DevOps with AWS. He shares his career journey and many of the experiences he has gained as the owner of Lean Phoenix, a company that is dedicated to helping its customers build high-quality software and services.

Jeffrey has a wealth of experience in software architect and has done some pretty interesting projects in his career. Be sure to listen in to hear Jeffrey's key insights on integrating Azure DevOps with AWS!

Topics of Discussion:

[:39] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes.

[:48] About today's guest, Jeffrey Opdam!

[1:35] Jeffrey welcomes Jeffrey Opdam to the podcast.

[1:52] Jeffrey speaks about his career journey and some of the important moments that have really shaped it.

[3:27] Jeffrey speaks about how in his current projects he's doing a lot with making Cloud resources, having AWS do his bidding, and actually governing the DevOps environment with the Azure DevOps product but with the software environments in AWS.

[4:24] Is Jeffrey using Azure DevOps Services or Server?

[4:31] Are all the agents VMs inside AWS?

[4:47] What type of system is Jeffrey's team working on at Lean Phoenix?

[5:43] Jeffrey speaks about how it is not just one application, but actually a DevOps environment that they have designed and implemented for an entire ecosystem of applications for multiple teams.

[6:50] Roughly, how many software applications and how many builds per day does their system run?

[7:22] Jeffrey speaks about how they're integrating Azure DevOps with AWS so that it's done in a trusted manner.

[8:28] How does Jeffrey manage spinning up all the images and maintaining them?

[9:29] For Windows to spin up a new agent does it lie in AWS rather than Azure DevOps?

[10:16] Before Jeffrey designed and implemented this system, what was it like for the teams?

[12:11] Does Jeffrey agree with the sentiment that "builds are really just a big test"?

[13:11] Are all of Jeffrey's pre-production and production environments for all of the software systems all in AWS?

[13:39] Jeffrey shares what he has learned through automatically deploying a variety of applications with varying architectures.

[15:14] If Jeffrey were to help a team get the next new application up and running, what would be his advice for the most flexible and drama-free environment shape to choose in AWS?

[16:55] In the same scenario, what would he recommend for web applications and SQL server databases?

[17:40] Jeffrey sheds some light on the differences between Docker and Kubernetes in AWS.

[19:22] A quick word from Azure DevOps Podcast's sponsor: Clear Measure.

[19:50] Jeffrey gives some quick announcements.

[21:39] With so many applications at Jeffrey's firm, how long should someone expect it to take for a developer to develop the first feature when it comes to starting a new application?

[23:04] What were the points of standardization at Jeffrey's firm?

[23:43] In Azure DevOps, is Jeffrey using the new YAML format or is he using the step-based pipeline format?

[25:00] Jeffrey gives his take on the kinds of people that say they're just going to log in to AWS and create the environments using their browser.

[26:26] Does Jeffrey advocate provisioning environments from the get-go from script rather than designing the environments and then planning to script it out sometime later?

[27:05] Jeffrey speaks about his favorite provisioning tool at the moment.

[28:55] Once you provision an environment, what mechanism do you use to migrate it or change something about the environment?

[31:50] Do they deploy firewall rules automatically?

[32:54] Jeffrey shares another effort that they did at Lean Phoenix.

[34:30] Where to learn more about integrating Azure DevOps with AWS!

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

Clear Measure (Sponsor)

.NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook!

bit.ly/dotnetdevopsbookforcommunity — Visit to get your hands on two free books to give away at conferences or events!

Jeffrey Palermo's Youtube