DevOps Hackathon

Challenge 1: Establish your plan  

To have a successful DevOps strategy, your team needs to have a plan. In this challenge, your team will learn about the basics of DevOps and gain an understanding of a team development model.  

Learning objectives:  

• Adopt a DevOps “mindset” in the team.   
• The participants are asked to get to know themselves better, organize the team and define how and where they will handle work items.   
• Design task board to track work in progress.  

Challenge 2: Setting up the Development Workflow  

In this challenge, teams will select tools to meet the planning objectives as it relates to continuous integration.  

Learning objectives:  

• The participants will learn the fundamentals of Planning and Continuous Integration using the tooling of their choice.  
• By using Branch Protection, teams can enforce code quality policies for incoming changes ensuring that each service has a code owner.   

• Participants review pull requests before changes are merged into the main code base.  

Challenge 3: Deploy Cloud Infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (IaC)  

In this challenge, teams will build workflow for cloud infrastructure deployment.  

Learning objectives:  

• Participants will learn how to deploy cloud infrastructure on Azure using infrastructure definition from the code.  

Challenge 4: Implement Continuous Integration (CI) with Testing  

In this challenge, teams will improve the reliability of their code by introducing testing.  

Learning objectives:  

• Participants will learn to integrate unit tests into a build workflow to supply rapid feedback and augment thorough code reviews designed to only accept changes into main when all tests pass.  
• They will be asked to run unit tests automatically and integrate them in the workflow they are building.  

Challenge 5: Implement Continuous Deployment (CD)  

In this challenge, teams will focus on release management automation.  

Learning objectives:  

• The participants will learn the fundamentals of Release Management by automatically deploying an updated version of their application to an Azure App Service.  
• They will also be asked to demonstrate that the respective container images are only updated when changes are successfully merged into the main branch.  

Challenge 6: Implement a Blue/Green deployment strategy  

In this challenge, teams will learn how to perform a zero down time deployment using a Blue/Green deployment strategy.  

Learning objectives: 

• Building on earlier challenges, participants will learn how to implement a blue/green deployment strategy.   
• They will be asked to articulate the blue/green logic and demonstrate its implementation for one of the APIs of the provided application, so that they are able roll out code changes without causing application downtime.  

Challenge 7: DevSecOps – Get rid of secrets  

In this challenge, teams will learn about securing codebase and prevent leaks of secrets.   

Learning objectives:  

• The participants will learn how to detect secrets in the codebase and move all sensitive data to a secure place.  
• They will be asked to implement a secret rotation strategy for SQL database.  

Challenge 8: Integrating quality and security gates  

In this challenge, teams will learn how to enhance their testing strategy through integration with external tools focused on improving the quality of the software that is released into production.  

Learning objectives:  

• The participants will be required to improve the automated testing capabilities of their pipelines to incorporate more sophisticated quality and security checks.  

• They will also be required to demonstrate one or more of the following enhancements to their pipeline: Dependency scanning, SAST, DAST, Variant Analysis, Code Coverage, Integration Tests, Load Tests and Manual Approval prior to deployment.  

Challenge 9: Implement a monitoring solution with alerting  

In this challenge, teams will learn about configuring a monitoring and alerting solution.   

Learning objectives:  

• The participants will learn how to close the DevOps loop by adding monitoring and alerting.   
• They will be asked to demonstrate a view aggregating the monitoring of the application and infrastructure. They also will have to implement alerting in the case of application performance degradation. Alerts should also generate a work item in the teamwork tracking system.  

Challenge 10: Implement phased rollout with rollback  

In this challenge, teams will learn how to enhance their Blue/Green Deployment strategy by performing a gradual release of software into production with a rollback strategy.  

Learning objectives:  

• The participants will revise their deployment strategy and learn how to perform a blue/green deployment with gradual rollout and how to implement a “rollback” mechanism.  
• They will be asked to add several phases to their existing pipeline to support a gradual rollout/rollback of a new version of the application. They will be asked to implement gates to validate the behavior of the application and implement a rollback mechanism.