Customized Build Agents with Ahmed Ilyas - Episode 140

Today’s guest today is Ahmed Ilyas. Ahmed is a previous Microsoft employee and Microsoft MVP who has a lot of passion and enthusiasm to share. He believes in providing best practices and solutions to any customer of virtually any industry and likes to see solutions put in practice. His personal goal for every project is to make sure that clients and customers are happy — but also to make sure that he delivers the best possible solution to them and to enable them to succeed further in their line of business. Ahmed has a broad focus on the entirety of the Microsoft stack (from development tools and languages to business-to-business applications).   In this episode, Ahmed speaks about customized build agents and agent pools, how Azure DevOps works under the hood and the challenges that he and the Azure DevOps Product Group faced (and how they approached them) when he worked at Microsoft.   Topics of Discussion: [:38] Be sure to visit AzureDevOps.Show for past episodes and show notes. [:51] About The Azure DevOps Podcast, Clear Measure, the new podcast Architect Tips, and Jeffrey’s offer to speak at virtual user groups. [1:24] About today’s episode with Ahmed Ilyas. [2:27] Jeffrey welcomes Ahmed Ilyas to the podcast! [2:40] Ahmed shares about his rich career journey. [6:08] Ahmed speaks about some of his favorite career highlights. [7:58] Ahmed’s Microsoft-specific career highlights. [9:27] Ahmed dives into the specific things he worked on in his role at Microsoft with Azure DevOps. [12:30] How many tests did Ahmed need to run in his role at Microsoft? [15:52] Did Ahmed and his team ever push the build agents and the worker pools to their limits? [18:14] A word from Azure DevOps Podcast’s sponsor: Clear Measure. [18:45] An Azure subscription has a CPU core limit. Ahmed elaborates on the way that this works. [20:54] For developers using Azure Pipelines today, what are the options that they have with hosted pools that they should take advantage of? [22:11] What’s the most straightforward way to get an extra dependency on the hosted agent so that a developer can use it? [24:59] Ahmed highlights a key piece about hosted agents. [26:12] Ahmed shares some tips and tricks for how Azure DevOps works under the hood. [28:00] Ahmed’s predictions on what he believes will become a lot easier in the next 5-10 from technological advancement. [31:18] Ahmed recommends some relevant go-to resources to check out. [31:09] Jeffrey thanks Ahmed for joining the podcast!   Mentioned in this Episode: Architect Tips — New video podcast! Azure DevOps Clear Measure (Sponsor) .NET DevOps for Azure: A Developer's Guide to DevOps Architecture the Right Way, by Jeffrey Palermo — Available on Amazon! bit.ly/dotnetdevopsebook — Click here to download the .NET DevOps for Azure ebook! Jeffrey Palermo’s Youtube Jeffrey Palermo’s Twitter — Follow to stay informed about future events! The Azure DevOps Podcast’s Twitter: @AzureDevOpsShow Docs.Microsoft.com   Want to Learn More? Visit AzureDevOps.Show for show notes and additional episodes.