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GitHub Copilot for IT Pros – my 23rd Pluralsight Course Published

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Exciting announcement for the new year. My 23rd course with Pluralsight has published! This one is a Generative AI related course. It is titled “GitHub Copilot for IT Pros“. This is my first course in 2024.

Github Copilot is not just for Developers, its also for IT pros. In today’s world, AI is ubiquitous, enhancing efficiency and acting as a valuable assistant. GitHub Copilot, an AI-powered para-programmer, accelerates coding for developers, making the process faster and more efficient. IT professionals can also leverage Copilot to enhance their efficiency across various domains, including automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

This course is for folks in roles such as Platform Engineers, DevOps Engineers, Systems Engineers, Cloud Engineers, and more. It will help you learn how GitHub Copilot can be leveraged as coding sidekick, speeding up IaC and automation script development.

This course shows you how to use GitHub Copilot, the AI-powered peer developer integrated into Visual Studio Code. First, you’ll explore GitHub Copilot and its features. Next, you’ll discover GitHub Copilot IDE integrations. Finally, you’ll learn how to use GitHub Copilot’s various features. When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have the skills and knowledge of GitHub Copilot needed to utilize GitHub Copilot as an IT pro.

Some of the major topics covered include:

  1. What AI & Common AI Terminology is?
  2. Understanding GitHub Copilot and its Features.
  3. How to setup GitHub Copilot with VS Code?
  4. How to use GitHub Copilot features like: suggestions, autofill, code testing, Copilot chat & more.

When you’re finished with this course, you’ll have a better understanding of GitHub Copilot all up and how it can be a critical tool for IT pros.

Check out the “GitHub Copilot for IT Pros“ course here:

https://www.pluralsight.com/courses/github-copilot-it-pros

This course is also part of new “Microsoft Copilot Product Journey” and “Generative AI for IT Pros Path” paths on the Pluralsight platform.

https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/skills/generative-ai-for-it-pros

https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/skills/microsoft-copilot-product-journey

In the Microsoft Copilot Product Journey path you will also find courses on the following (NOTE: many of the courses are still being developed):

Introduction to Microsoft Copilot
Copilot for Microsoft 365 Apps (Microsoft Office)
Copilot for Microsoft Teams
Copilot for Web
Copilot for Microsoft Windows
Copilot for Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive
Copilot for Power Platform: The Big Picture

I hope you find value in this new GitHub Copilot for IT Pros course. Be sure to follow my profile on Pluralsight so you will be notified as I release new courses! 

Here is the link to my Pluralsight profile to follow me:

https://www.pluralsight.com/authors/steve-buchanan

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Azure Friday: Exploring Automated Deployments for AKS with Steve Buchanan and Scott Hanselman

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Hey everyone, today I’m super excited to tell you about a recent episode of Azure Friday that I was lucky enough to be a guest on.

Azure Friday is a weekly video series hosted by the legendary Scott Hanselman, where he interviews experts and developers on various Azure-related topics. In this episode, we talked about Automated Deployments for AKS, a new feature that makes it super easy to deploy your apps to Azure Kubernetes Service.

If you’re not familiar with AKS, it’s a managed Kubernetes service that lets you run containerized applications on Azure without having to worry about the complexity of managing the cluster. It’s a great way to scale your apps and take advantage of the benefits of Kubernetes, such as high availability, load balancing, and service discovery.

But what if you’re not familiar with containers or Kubernetes? What if you just have some code in a GitHub repo and you want to run it on AKS? That’s where Automated Deployments for AKS come in. It’s a feature that simplifies the Kubernetes development process by taking care of the tedious work of containerization for you. It uses a tool called Draft, which automatically detects the language and framework of your app, creates a Dockerfile and a Helm chart for you, builds and pushes the image to Azure Container Registry, and deploys the app to AKS. All with just a few clicks in the Azure Portal.

Sounds amazing, right? Well, that’s what I wanted to show Scott in this episode. I had an app hosted in a GitHub repo that I wanted to run on AKS. The app was a simple web app that displayed some data from a database. I had already created a few resources in Azure, such as a resource group, an Azure Container Registry, and an AKS cluster. All I needed to do was use Automated Deployments for AKS to get this app from code to running on a cluster.

So how did it go? Well, you’ll have to watch the episode to find out. But spoiler alert: it was super easy and fast. In just a few commands, I went from code to an app running on AKS. Scott was impressed and so was I. We had a great time chatting about how Automated Deployments for AKS works under the hood, some of the benefits and limitations of using it, and how it can help developers get started with containers and Kubernetes.

Check out the episode here:

https://aka.ms/azfr/749

With Automated Deployments, Microsoft is opening up new avenues for developers to embrace the power of containers and AKS, enabling them to effortlessly build scalable and robust applications.

If you’re interested in learning more about Automated Deployments for AKS, you can check out the documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/automated-deployments. It’s available today in public preview, so you can try it out for yourself and see how easy it is to run your apps on AKS.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoy this episode of Azure Friday as much as I did. It was an honor and a pleasure to be a guest on Scott’s show and talk about one of my favorite topics: Azure Kubernetes Service. If you have any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment or reach out to me on Twitter at @Buchatech. Thanks for reading and happy coding!

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Guest on AzureTalks Podcast – Containerize apps to AKS with Azure Draft, and Hybrid with Azure Arc

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I am kicking off the new year as a guest on the “AzureTalks” podcast by Rolf Schutten. Rolf is a Microsoft MVP based out of the Netherlands. The AzureTalks podcast is a free-form conversation with experts and advocates around the industry discussing various topics on Azure, its services, and integration points with Azure. Some of the topics also get into strategy career, personal development, and more. You can listen to podcast episodes on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can find the website for this podcast here: www.azuretalks.com

The episode I am a guest on is #004 titled “Containerize apps to AKS with Azure Draft, and Hybrid with Azure Arc“.

In this episode, we discuss how developers can utilize Azure Draft to streamline taking their non-containerized app from code to running on AKS. Azure Draft takes you through the entire process from creating the container, the files needed to run on Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, or Kustomize, pushing up to an Azure Container Registry, and deploying to AKS.

We also dive into GitHub, GitOps, the differences between push and pull methods with continuous deployment, and even we even touched on hybrid cloud strategies and what role Azure Arc plays in this space. Listen to the audio version of the podcast episode here:

or check out the video version here.

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Guest on Kubernetes Unpacked Podcast EP014 – “Using GitOps and AKS to Build and Deploy Apps

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I recently was a guest on Michael Levan‘s Kubernetes Unpacked Podcast on the Packet Pushers network.

This is Kubernetes Unpacked episode #014 it is titled: “Using GitOps And AKS To Build And Deploy Applications“

Michael and I talked about using GitOps and Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to automate the building and deployment of applications. We also chat about an entire architecture incorporating AKS, GitHub Actions, Azure Container Registry, GitHub, and ArgoCD along with how it all comes together to make a useful stack. Check out the podcast below.

Link to the podcast:

https://packetpushers.net/podcast/kubernetes-unpacked-014-using-gitops-and-aks-to-build-and-deploy-applications/

Listen here:

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My 1st Microsoft Article: Build and deploy apps on AKS using DevOps (GitHub Actions) and GitOps (ArgoCD)

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Yesterday a new article titled “Build and deploy apps on AKS using DevOps and GitOps” was published. This is an article I was working on for a while and it is the first item of work that I can share publicly since joining Microsoft. I am working on many other things I can’t share publicly at the moment. :-)!

The article is a part of the Azure Architecture Center. This article is about modernizing end-to-end app build and deploy using containers, continuous integration (CI) via GitHub Actions for build and push to an Azure Container Registry, as well as GitOps via Argo CD for continuous deployment (CD) to an AKS cluster.

The article can be found here: 

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-with-aks

The article explores deploying a Python and Flask based app via two CI/CD approaches push-based and pull-based (GitOps). It is complete with a pros and cons comparison of both approaches and architecture diagrams for each that you can download. Here is a screenshot of the pull-based (GitOps) architecture:

The technologies used in this article and scenario include:

GitHub

GitHub Actions

Azure Container Registry

Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)

Argo CD (GitOps Operator)

Azure Monitor

This article also has a repository with code for both the push-based CI/CD scenario and the pull-based CI/CD (GitOps) scenario in the AKS Baseline Automation. I had the opportunity to spearhead and work on these. They will walk through using each approach and have the code for the Flask App, and GitHub Actions to run the approaches. A direct link to this section of the article is here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/example-scenario/apps/devops-with-aks#deploy-this-scenario

I hope that you find all of this useful. Now go check out the article and deploy the app using the approaches. Stay tuned for more from me at Microsoft and for more blog posts here!

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