13-08-2020 Online Meetup: AMA with Donovan Brown and Abel Wang from Microsoft
Channel: Azure Meetup Berlin
Date: 2020-08-15

In this meetup, we had a special format with two of the most well-known enthusiasts when it comes to DevOps topics and Azure.

AMA with Donovan Brown and Abel Wang. These two guys who know each other for decades are also one of the most well-known advocates for DevOps, development, and cloud evangelism at Microsoft. AMA = Ask me Anything is about you asking questions and they give you their answers and opinion from their huge experience with many customers and projects. Users were prepared to ask questions for one hour with an interactive talk between them and the community, YOU.

And very sorry, but the first question is a bit cut off and the first answer as well. But the rest is complete.

--- Questions in this video ---

0:00 - Question 1: How much do you think of the whole agile and DevOps philosophy can be transferred to nearly 100% home office these days and what stays the same and what must be done differently?

3:42 - Question 2: Since you worked with each other for decades and people know that you often only come in a pack of two. What do you think makes a great colleague to work with.

9:08 - Question 3: What process template should you use if you are a small team?

12:02 - Question 4: How did Microsoft change from waterfall to agile?

17:55 - Question 5: We have 10 teams of members and a few PMs to manage consistency. Somehow with all the DevOps, we grew a gap between Marketing and R&D. How is it possible to close the gap again between not so agile teams.

21:38 - Question 6: What do you think is the better way to go for CI/CD, Azure pipeline or Github Actions? Or is it a different approach? Or is it actually the same?

24:02 - Question 7: Is it possible to create a System.AccessToken with another identity? That can be helpful to create different security layers in the azure DevOps automation. For example, we have pipelines that write stuff in workitems. Another use case is to trigger other pipelines from a pipeline. But if I always set the ACLs to `Project Collection Build Services` I create a superuser in my Collection.

26:25 - Question 8: We'd like to transform 50 teams repositories to Git with single trunk strategy. We'd like to use Feature Toggling with a decent saas platform out there. Anything else you'd like to recommend?

28:26 - Question 9: How would you go about deploying microservices pipeline in a ci/cd pipeline? Would you recommend deploying based on teams or more along the lines of resources; especially in the case of shared resources?

31:33 - Question 10: How do you deal with "hero" developers? (hint: it's a bad thing)

36:35 - Question 11: When will we see you playing the guitar again? (for Abel) / What's the best/most realistic online air hockey game? (for Donovan)

37:35 - Question 12: What do you think will be the most significant change to DevOps in the next 5 Years

40:54 - Question 13: Do you have any advice for a large organization heavily invested in Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines when it comes to the excitement around GitHub and Actions? It's challenging to support many teams that want to use many tools.

43:52 - Question 14:  Are there any enhancements coming to the Azure DevOps migration tool? Maybe migrating individual projects vs entire collections all at once. Without the need to split a large collection prior to migrating for example.

45:44 - Question 15: Given there is a company with 10 developers and they work on several projects at a time. doing Scrum for every project itself did not work out very well. Do you have any experience with this kind of work you can share?

50:26 - Question 16: What do you recommend to manage DB versions and update safely?

52:29 - Question 17: Is there anything in Azure DevOps which is similar to Github Deploy Keys. We want to make sure that a PAT used for machine to machine communication isn't invalidated when e.g. the corresponding user leaves the company. Is there any solution for this?

53:46 - Question 18: How do you see the move for Scrum to get moved from a process more to work as a framework?

55:51 - Question 19: Is / will there be a way to transfer a PAT to the other user? For example, I am used to be the "Build Manager" in a project and have to transfer my work to a new colleague.

56:50 - Question 20: How do you go about spinning up test environments for different product teams? In production, it feels easy because it's singular, but test environments every dev prefers there own environment.

58:21 - Question 21: Is the universal feed anywhere soon in the azure DevOps server too?
Feature timeline: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/features-timeline

58:43 - Goodbye and thank you by Donovan and Abel

-------------------
https://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Microsoft-Azure-Meetup/events/272292411/?comment_table_id=267047671&comment_table_name=reply

https://www.razorspoint.com/2020/08/15/azure-meetup-ama-with-donovan-brown-and-abel-wang-online/