Richie Lee

Both Minecraft and Devops are phenomena from the early 2010s that have stood the test of time. But what can we learn from the sandbox-based video game Minecraft that can be applied to a set of practices for software development? By the end of this session I hope you have an appreciation of both DevOps and Mincraft!

With an enterprise data lake you have multiple authorisation mechanisms. For a tightly controlled level of access, you can use Access Control Lists (ACLs). We will cover ACL permissions and how to store and deploy ACLs from source.

Let's be honest; dealing with Keys for Azure Service Principal can be a pain. Fortunately Azure Active Identity has an Identity type called Managed Identity that we can assign to a resource and make use of that for authorisation. We will discuss the beneifts of using Managed Identities in Azure to authorise resources without having to use Service Principals.

When using SAS Keys to access Azure Storage Containers, there is a problem with managing the expiry date; in that it is an immutable property.However, this is an alternative, by assigning a Stored Access Policy to a SAS Key we can manage the expiry date in our pipelines. We will disucss how to do this, and the challenges and other benefits when using Stored Access Policies.

In Python installations, a package maanger called pip is used to ensure the required libraries are installed and loaded into the session. WIth PowerShell, it is not quite straightforward. Rather than having to require a deep understanding of just how PowerShell installs modules, we will talk about a PowerShell module that simplifies the install and loading of the required versions of modules that can be used both locally and as part of a build/deploy pipeline.

A CI/CD pipeline that is not trusted because of it's rate of failure due to unreliability is sometimes worse than no pipeline at all. In this talk we will discuss our experiences of what works and what prevents a reliable deployment process.