I'm looking at an example of the YAML pipeline with a services section. Here is a sample:
The YAML schema doesn't have services defined.
Where can I get information about the services section of the pipeline?
Update: Per Bowman's answer, the services section is part of the job step. In this scenario, there is only one job so the job step is omitted.
In the simplest case, a pipeline has a single job. In that case, you do not have to explicitly use the job keyword unless you are using a template. You can directly specify the steps in your YAML file.
here is the reference
There is in the official document:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/yaml-schema/jobs-job?view=azure-pipelines
services: # Container resources to run as a service container.
I think you directly check it in the top level, right? In fact, in this situation, there is a hidden default job, the definition of the job also be hidden. services section is under the job definition of that hidden job, not the top level.
Related
I am trying to find out what is the equivalent ADO YAML task for the Classic "Task group: Docker Container Image Creation".
I tried Docker and Docker Compose tasks but both of them don't have an argument to capture the environment the application package was built for.
Since the name of the task in the classic editor is "Task group: Docker Container Image Creation", what you see in the classic editor is probably a task group:
A task group allows you to encapsulate a sequence of tasks, already defined in a build or a release pipeline, into a single reusable task that can be added to a build or release pipeline, just like any other task. You can choose to extract the parameters from the encapsulated tasks as configuration variables, and abstract the rest of the task information.
...
Task groups are a way to standardize and centrally manage deployment steps for all your applications. When you include a task group in your definitions, and then make a change centrally to the task group, the change is automatically reflected in all the definitions that use the task group. There is no need to change each one individually.
When a task group is created the creator can define their own parameters and use them in one or more subtasks inside the task group.
To replicate this behavior in yaml pipelines you need to examine the task group to understand what tasks it contains and then define a reusable template in yaml, which allows you to define reusable content, logic, and parameters
Task group is only available classic pipelines (see here).
For YAML pipelines, you can set up the step template to reuse the same steps in different YAML pipelines.
We are looking for a solution how to move the non-secret variables from the Variable groups into the code repositories.
We would like to have the possibilities:
to track the changes of all the settings in the code repository
version value of the variable together with the source code, pipeline code version
Problem:
We have over 100 variable groups defined which are referenced by over 100 YAML pipelines.
They are injected at different pipeline/stage/job levels depends on the environment/component/stage they are operating on.
Example problems:
some variable can change their name, some variable can be removed and in the pipeline which targets the PROD environment it is still referenced, and on the pipeline which deploys on DEV it is not there
particular pipeline run used the version of the variables at some date in the past, it is good to know with what set of settings it had been deployed in the past
Possible solutions:
It should be possible to use the simple yaml template variables file to mimic the variable groups and just include the yaml templates with variable groups into the main yamls using this approach: Variable reuse.
# File: variable-group-component.yml
variables:
myComponentVariable: 'SomeVal'
# File: variable-group-environment.yml
variables:
myEnvVariable: 'DEV'
# File: azure-pipelines.yml
variables:
- template: variable-group-component.yml # Template reference
- template: variable-group-environment.yml # Template reference
#some stages/jobs/steps:
In theory, it should be easy to transform the variable groups to the YAML template files and reference them from YAML instead of using a reference to the variable group.
# Current reference we use
variables:
- group: "Current classical variable group"
However, even without implementing this approach, we hit the following limit in our pipelines: "No more than 100 separate YAML files may be included (directly or indirectly)"
YAML templates limits
Taking into consideration the requirement that we would like to have the variable groups logically granulated and separated and not stored in one big yml file (in order to not hit another limit with the number of variables in a job agent) we cannot go this way.
The second approach would be to add a simple script (PowerShell?) which will consume some key/value metadata file with variables (variableName/variableValue) records and just execute job step with a command to
##vso[task.setvariable variable=one]secondValue.
But it could be only done at the initial job level, as a first step, and it looks like the re-engineering variable groups mechanism provided natively in Azure DevOps.
We are not sure that this approach will work everywhere in the YAML pipelines when the variables are currently used. Somewhere they are passed as arguments to the tasks. Etc.
Move all the variables into the key vault secrets? We abandoned this option at the beginning as the key vault is a place to store sensitive data and not the settings which could be visible by anyone. Moreover storing it in secrets cause the pipeline logs to put * instead of real configuration setting and obfuscate the pipeline run log information.
Questions:
Q1. Do you have any other propositions/alternatives on how the variables versioning/changes tracking could be achieved in Azure DevOps YAML pipelines?
Q2. Do you see any problems in the 2. possible solution, or have better ideas?
You can consider this as alternative:
Store your non-secrets variable in json file in a repository
Create a pipeline to push variables to App Configuration (instead a Vault)
Then if you need this settings in your app make sure that you reference to app configuration from the app instead running replacement task in Azure Devops. Or if you need this settings directly by pipelines Pull them from App Configuration
Drawbacks:
the same as one mentioned by you in Powershell case. You need to do it job level
What you get:
track in repo
track in App Configuration and all benefits of App Configuration
We're building out a release pipeline in Azure DevOps which pushes to a Kubernetes cluster. The first step in the pipeline is to run an Azure CLI script which sets up all the resources - this is an idempotent script so we can run it each time we run the release pipeline. Our intention is to have a standardised release pipeline which we can run against several clusters, existing and new.
The final step in the pipeline is to run the Kubectl task with the apply command.
However, this pipeline task requires specifying in advance (at the time of building the pipeline) the names of the resource group and cluster against which it should be executed. But the point of the idempotent script in the first step is to ensure that the resources and to create if not.
So there's the possibility that neither the resource group nor the cluster will exist before the pipeline is run.
How can I achieve this in a DevOps pipeline if the Kubectl task requires a resource group and a cluster to be specified at design time?
This Kubectl task works with service connection type: Azure Resource Manager. And it requires to select Resource group field and Kubernetes cluster field after you select the Azure subscription, as below.
After testing, we find that these 2 fields supports variable. Thus you could use variable in these 2 fields, and using PowerShell task to set variable value before this Kubectl task. See: Set variables in scripts for details.
I'm creating a Deployment Group in CodeDeploy with a CloudFormation template.
The Deployment Group is successfully created and the application is deployed perfectly fine.
The CF resource that I defined (Type: AWS::CodeDeploy::DeploymentGroup) has the "Deployment" property set. The thing is that I would like to configure automatic rollbacks for this deployment, but as per CF documentation for "AutoRollbackConfiguration" property: "Information about the automatic rollback configuration that is associated with the deployment group. If you specify this property, don't specify the Deployment property."
So my understanding is that if I specify "Deployment", I cannot set "AutoRollbackConfiguration"... Then how are you supposed to configure any rollback for the deployment? I don't see any other resource property that relates to rollbacks.
Should I create a second DeploymentGroup resource and bind it to the same instances that the original Deployment Group has? I'm not sure this is possible or makes sense but I ran out of options.
Thanks,
Nicolas
First i like to describe why you cannot specify both, deployment and rollback configuration:
Whenever you specify a deployment directly for the group, you already state which revision you like to deploy. This conflicts with the idea of CloudFormation of having resources managed by it without having a drift in the actual configuration of those resources.
I would recommend the following:
Use CloudFormation to deploy the 'underlying' infrastructure (the deployment group, application, roles, instances, etc.)
Create a CodePipline within this infrastructure template, which then includes a CodeDeploy deployment action (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/codepipeline/latest/userguide/action-reference-CodeDeploy.html, https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-properties-codepipeline-pipeline-stages-actions-actiontypeid.html)
The pipeline can triggered whenever you have a new version inside you revision location
This approach clearly separates the underlying stuff, which is not changing dynamically and the actual application deployment, done using a proper pipeline.
Additionally in this way you can specify how you like to deploy (green/blue, canary) and how/when rollbacks should be handled. The status of your deployment also to be seen inside CodePipeline.
I didn't mention it but what you are suggesting about CodePipeline is exactly what I did.
In fact, I have one CloudFormation template that creates all the infrastructure and includes the DeploymentGroup. With this, the application is deployed for the first time to my EC2 instances.
Then I have another CF template for CI/CD purposes with a CodeDeploy stage/action that references the previous DeploymentGroup. Whenever I push some code to my repository, the Pipeline is triggered, code is built and new version successfully deployed to the instances.
However, I don't see how/where in any of the CF templates to handle/configure the rollback for the DeploymentGroup as you were saying. I think I get the idea of your explanation about the conflict CF might have in case of having a drift, but my impression is that in case of errors during the CF stack creation, CF rollback should just remove the DeploymentGroup you're trying to create. In other words, for me there's no CodeDeploy deployment rollback involved in that scenario, just removing the resource (DeploymentGroup) CF was trying to create.
One thing that really impresses me is that you can enable/disable automatic rollbacks for the DeploymentGroup through the AWS Console. Just edit and go to Advanced Configuration for the DeploymentGroup and you have a checkbox. I tried it and triggered the Pipeline again and worked perfectly. I made a faulty change to make the deployment fail in purpose, and then CodeDeploy automatically reverted back to the previous version of my application... completely expected behavior. Doesn't make much sense that this simple boolean/flag option is not available through CF.
Hope this makes sense and helps clarifying my current situation. Any extra help would be highly appreciated.
Thanks again
I'm using Azure DevOps on a vs2017-win2016 build agent to provision some infrastructure using Terraform.
What I want to know is it possible to pass the Terraform Output of a hosts dynamically assigned IP address to a
2nd Job running a different build agent.
I'm able to pass these to build variables in the first Job
BASTION_PRIV_IP=x.x.x.x
BASTION_PUB_IP=1.1.1.1
But un-able to get these variables to appear to be consumed with the second build agent running ubuntu-16.04
I am able to pass any static defined parameters like Azure Resource Group name that I define before the job start, its just the
dynamically assigned ones.
This is pretty easily done when you are using the YAML based builds.
It's important to know that variables are only available within the scope of current job by default.
However you can set a variable as an output variable for your job.
This output variable can then be mapped to a variable within second job (do note that you need to set the first job as a dependency for the second job).
Please see the following link for an example of how to get this to work
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/variables?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml%2Cbatch#set-a-multi-job-output-variable
It may also be doable in the visual designer type of build, but i couldn't get that to work in the quick test i did, maybe you can get something to work inspired on the linked example.