DevOps on the Cheap

Monday, October 12, 2020

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You’ve heard the saying, you can't teach an old dog new tricks?

These days you may have heard CI/CD (Continuous integration/Continuous delivery) thrown around.

If you’re a small team of BI/SQL/.NET developers  sharing a number of projects and never moved into source control then there is light at the tunnel which doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, actually its free !

Microsoft released Visual Studio Community edition awhile back for free with the only caveat that you must login into Microsoft every 30+ days (check out https://github.com/beatcracker/VSCELicense to work around offline mode).

 

Community Edition is great for SQL/BI developers when you include the SSIS Extension from the Visual Studio Market place, also free.

The next freebie is Microsoft Source Code Repository platform which has been rebadged several times from Team Foundation Server online (TFS), DevOps and now called Azure DevOps (https://dev.azure.com).

Azure DevOps is free for the first 5 developers so now you can sign-up using Azure AD and migrate your shared projects into a source code repository with the added benefit of creating a SSIS CI/CD pipeline to automatically build ispac deployments.

You’ll need to add the SSIS Build task from the marketplace for this however (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=SSIS.ssis-devops-tools) but again that’s free !

Gradually you can make these build pipelines rich depending on your needs but at least its a start.

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