Browse All DevOps Content (598)

Sameen Karim explains how GitHub uses a swarm of AI agents to stress test new features before release, with agents continuously probing for edge cases and attempts to circumvent rules to help harden the system.

Allison announces general availability of GitHub’s open source license compliance for GitHub Enterprise Cloud, adding enterprise-wide license policies and PR checks to help teams prevent non-compliant dependencies from being merged.

Jesse Houwing breaks down how real-world supply chain attacks have abused GitHub Actions workflows, then walks through the platform changes GitHub shipped in 2025–2026 (from safer pull_request_target behavior to lock files and cache controls) and ends with a practical checklist of hardening steps to apply now.

Visual Studio Code highlights what’s new in VS Code v1.142, including interactive canvases for agent workflows, chat handoffs that keep context, and new Markdown editing capabilities, with a link to the full weekly update notes.

Fokko at Work demos selected new features in Visual Studio Code 1.142 with a focus on GitHub Copilot and related UI changes, including canvases and the redesigned model picker, plus workflow improvements like moving chats between folders and worktrees.

RicardoDuncan rounds up the latest SQL developer tooling updates for VS Code, including new MSSQL extension features, GitHub Copilot schema-aware agent workflows, and Microsoft SQL “skills” for assessing and migrating SQL Server to Azure SQL, plus driver releases aligned with SQL Server 2025.

Allison announces general availability of the Xcode 27 GitHub Actions runner image for building and testing Apple apps, including the new runner labels to target the Xcode 27 toolchain on Apple Silicon hosted runners.

Allison announces updates to GitHub Copilot in Slack and Microsoft Teams, including multi-repo support in a single conversation plus improvements to mentions, repository switching, Slack thread context, and overall reliability.

Nick Brady’s September 2026 roundup covers Microsoft Foundry updates across models, agents, observability, and tooling—highlighting GPT-6 family GA, Routines and Tool Search GA, Insights preview, Model Router preview controls, and Foundry Local 2.1 bring-your-own-model support with ONNX Runtime GenAI.

Manfred Riem and Nicole Haugen join Open Source Friday to walk through the Spec Kit 1.0.0 release, focusing on what changed in the project and what it takes to ship a stable open source developer tool.

Allison announces a new GitHub Code Quality billing feature that lets organizations download a CSV report of license usage, including which active committers consumed licenses, which repositories they contributed to in the last 90 days, and whether committers are unique to a repo or org.

Martin Woodward explains how GitHub Copilot’s agentic workflows are shifting development from issuing commands to expressing intent, and why “ambient intelligence” needs strong context, clear boundaries, and developer control. He also shares a practical example: mapping Copilot actions to physical controls like the Logitech MX Keypad.

Greg Mohler explains how GitHub built “Evergreen”, a GitHub App that automates quarterly outside-collaborator access reviews and stale-repo archival using native GitHub features like Actions, issues, webhooks, and custom properties, with a fail-secure approach and an audit trail stored directly in git history.

Chet Husk introduces dotnetup, a public-preview toolchain manager that installs and updates user-local .NET SDKs and runtimes on macOS and Linux, with support for side-by-side stable, preview, and daily builds and predictable version pinning via global.json.

Mike Hulme explains how Azure is evolving its cloud-native platform to better support AI workloads and AI agents, focusing on coordinated compute/storage/networking, production-ready open-source foundations (notably Kubernetes), cost governance with FinOps, and “agentic” operations to improve reliability and efficiency at scale.

Allison announces general availability of GitHub’s AI Scan for pull requests, an AI-powered code scanning capability that complements CodeQL by detecting vulnerabilities in PR changes (including languages and file types CodeQL may not cover) and surfacing advisory findings with explanations and suggested fixes.

GitHub explains why making stacked pull requests a native feature is more than just linking PRs and merging them in order, and how it required changes to core merge architecture and legacy systems.

Mads Kristensen introduces a new Visual Studio 2026 (18.11) option that stops a solution build after the first project failure, so you can get back to fixing the first error instead of waiting for queued projects to finish.

Allison announces general availability of agentic autofix for GitHub code scanning alerts, where Copilot explores the codebase, proposes and validates fixes with CodeQL, and opens a draft pull request. The post also covers where it can be used, required policies and permissions, and how billing works with AI Credits and Actions minutes.

Visual Studio Code shows how to keep momentum while working with agents by highlighting text to ask follow-up questions in a side chat with its own context, or quoting selected text directly into your current chat for an immediate response.

Allison announces that GitHub has retired email notifications for repository push events as of October 15, 2026, and explains the spam/abuse rationale. The post also points developers to a replacement approach using a GitHub Actions workflow triggered on push to send emails via their own SMTP server or email provider.

dchelupati explains how to scale Azure SRE Agent from a single team to enterprise-wide use, focusing on access control, guardrails, auditing, multi-agent topologies, and “agent as code” practices for repeatable deployment and governance.

dchelupati shares a practical “start small” adoption guide for Azure SRE Agent, focused on picking a first operational use case, connecting only the required context (telemetry, repos, runbooks), and expanding into repeatable workflows with the right triggers and permissions.

Lee Murray explains how VS Code’s modernized UI preview evolved from the 2026 themes and the Agents window, and how developer feedback is shaping layout density, editor tabs, theming controls, and performance work in the workbench.

Sandeep Sen announces the stable Azure MCP Server 3.0 release and explains what’s new for bringing Azure operational tooling into MCP-compatible AI agent workflows, including Terraform and Advisor tooling, more predictable client integration, and security-focused defaults for resource creation.

Jakub Oleksy reports on GitHub’s September 2026 reliability work and incidents, including database pressure reductions, overload controls, added headroom for GitHub Actions, expanded failure containment for pull requests, and progress moving production workloads and traffic to Azure.

Taylor Cuilty explains how GitHub redesigned repository star history to return trends (daily counts) without exposing stargazer identities, while also cutting database load dramatically by filtering by time range before aggregating.

paulyuk shows how the Azure SRE Agent canvas fits into GitHub Copilot (App and Copilot CLI) so on-call engineers can validate an agent’s incident diagnosis with their own telemetry, queries, and access controls, then share a reviewed update back to the team.

The Visual Studio Code Team shares early release notes for VS Code 1.143 Insiders, highlighting updates to MCP server configuration, Agent Host chat controls for background shells, and a new extension contribution point for Explorer title actions.

Microsoft Developer demonstrates an end-to-end workflow for building and shipping a hosted AI agent from the terminal using GitHub Copilot CLI and Microsoft Foundry, including planning, resource creation, model selection, evaluation-driven improvements, and a secure Azure Functions proxy to connect the agent to a website chat experience.

Sameen Karim joins The GitHub Podcast to explain how GitHub’s native stacked pull requests work, including the internal merge architecture changes, how linked PR chains avoid “ghost merges,” and how the team addressed CODEOWNERS-related security loopholes while keeping stacked review workflows practical for engineering teams.

Visual Studio Code shows how the Agents window can create and manage a pull request end-to-end, including drafting the PR title and description, tracking CI checks, monitoring reviews, resolving conflicts, keeping the branch in sync, and merging automatically with configurable control.

Allison announces a public preview for GitHub Actions workflow dependency lockfiles, aimed at making workflow runs reproducible and reducing supply-chain risk from moved tags/branches or compromised actions. The post explains how to generate and maintain `.github/workflows/actions.lock`, and how admins can enforce lockfile usage with a new policy.

vinilv shows how to build a small, two-node kubeadm Kubernetes cluster on Azure using an N-series GPU VM, then validate GPU scheduling with the NVIDIA device plugin and a PyTorch CUDA test Job. The guide focuses on a transparent dev sandbox for debugging GPU workloads rather than a production-ready design.

Jacquie Capur joins Matty Stratton to unpack what “meaningful control” over tooling looks like in practice: understanding dependencies, verifying reliability, and keeping a realistic exit path. They connect classic DevOps lessons (config management, Terraform, CI/CD) to today’s fast-moving AI tooling, open models, and data residency constraints.

Allison announces a set of GitHub Apps updates focused on least-privilege access and easier administration, including new fine-grained permissions for repository creation and installation management, improved controls for adding approved apps to repos, and changes to token and credential handling for GitHub Apps.

Gloridel Morales announces the October 2026 patch release for Azure DevOps Server, with links to Patch 9 downloads and the corresponding release notes, plus a quick command to verify whether the patch is installed on your server.

sbaynes explains what changed when an AI agent moved from summarizing production network incidents to proposing (and potentially executing) real fixes, and why “safe autonomy” needs multiple deterministic layers rather than a single guardrail.

Allison announces new GitHub audit log events that let organizations and enterprises track manual dismissals and reopenings of GitHub Code Quality findings, including who performed the action, when it happened, and which repository, rule, and findings were affected.

Batu Ozturkler explains how GitHub Secret Scanning reduced false positives and sped up scanning by replacing an LLM-based stage with a compact, fine-tuned ModernBERT classifier that uses surrounding code and text context to decide whether a candidate string is a real credential.