Project Volterra - Windows Dev Kit 2023 - take 1

At Xpirit we have an Innovation Day multiple times per year. The idea of an Innovation Day is to work on technologies or topics that spark your interest. Anything is allowed, as long as it has nothing to do with any customer assignments. Learning and knowledge sharing is the goal of such a day.

At our last Innovation Day in november, I picked up the idea to get some hands on experience with the Windows Dev Kit 2023 also known as Project Volterra. Technology minded as we are, we purchased two of these boxes at the office for experimentation (big shout out to @marcelv).

Multi-staged GitHub Pipeline

At the moment I’m working on some infrastructure pipelines to build and deploy Azure infrastructure for one of our clients. For me a cool project as I’m learning to work with technologies such as Bicep and GitHub actions. In this project we use GitHub actions for the CI/CD process. In this process every time a pull request is merged in the main branch, an automated build, test and deployment process is triggered.

DevOps All the Way

In Practice what you preach I wrote that I decided to host my blog on the Azure platform, using Hugo as content management system, Blob Storage and Azure CDN for hosting the blog. The only thing lacking is a workflow of writing content, approving it and publishing it on the web.

As I work for a company that specialized on Azure and DevOps, I decided to take the plunge and go DevOps all the way. Doing some googling, I found out that there were some great tutorials out there to use an Azure DevOps CI/CD pipeline in combination with Hugo to compile and publish the blog. As a starter I followed this writing by kurtmkurtm.

Practice what you preach!

When I decided to start blogging again, I knew I wanted to talk about the things I face, working with Azure. In the past I used to blog as well, back then I blogged on my Journey into CRM which I started in 2014.

In 2014 the state of technology was much different; one would use WordPress (or similar). The main choice was host it yourself or host it at a hosting provider. Back then I chose the way of hosting it myself on a small linux appliance from my basement.