Browse DevOps Blogs (28)

Hidde de Smet breaks down what AI coding agents actually cost once GitHub Copilot switches to usage-based billing, including how credits map to tokens, why model choice changes your bill, and how to budget for agent-heavy teams without surprising finance.

Rob Bos introduces the GitHub Copilot App technical preview and shares a practical first look at using it for repository maintenance, including parallel agent sessions, session modes (Interactive/Plan/Autopilot), and the Agent Merge workflow for handling CI failures, merge conflicts, and security-related alerts.

John Edward explains how GitHub Copilot changes team workflows around pull requests, code review expectations, and knowledge sharing. The article focuses on the trade-offs of faster AI-assisted coding, why review discipline matters more, and how teams can add guardrails like testing and security scanning without losing collaboration.

John Edward outlines an architecture for a “Daily Stand-Up Agent”: a custom AI copilot that pulls sprint activity from Jira and Azure DevOps, detects blockers, and generates consistent stand-up summaries. The post focuses on connectors, grounding ticket data, conversational reporting, and practical considerations like security and data quality.

Rob Bos shares a real-world GitHub Copilot CLI mishap where an unintended Copilot CLI extension caused repeated prompts to close GitHub deployment-status notifications, and explains how he tracked down the source and removed it.

DevClass reports on the Zed editor reaching version 1.0, covering its Rust-based architecture, GPU-accelerated UI, built-in language server support, and the editor’s growing set of AI features (including agents) alongside an option to disable AI entirely.

John Edward explains how Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) capture the “why” behind technical choices, and how AI tools can generate consistent ADR drafts quickly so teams can focus on review, accuracy, and long-term knowledge sharing.

Rob Bos shares an overview of his open source projects spanning GitHub and CI/CD tooling, Azure-backed services, security reporting, and local-first AI utilities, with links to each repo and a clear description of what each tool does.

Rob Bos breaks down five GitHub Copilot and agent extensibility surfaces that create supply-chain and governance gaps in large enterprises, and explains what controls exist today (and where they don’t) across Copilot CLI plugins, APM, gh skill, MCP servers, and VS Code extension registries.

John Edward explains how to use GitHub as a “living” architecture repository—capturing Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), diagrams, standards, and roadmaps—and how pull requests and versioning can turn architecture work into a collaborative, auditable part of delivery.

DevClass.com reports on GitHub’s private preview of Stacked PRs, a workflow for breaking large changes into smaller, independently reviewable pull requests that can still depend on each other, with an optional gh stack CLI that’s also intended to work well with AI agents.

Jesse Houwing summarizes GitHub’s update that GitHub Copilot can now keep inference processing and associated data within US or EU data residency regions, and shows the enterprise/org policy you must enable to restrict Copilot to data-resident models.

Emanuele Bartolesi explains why Remote Desktop is a poor fit for day-to-day development on customer VMs, and shows how VS Code Remote Tunnels restores a normal local-editor workflow while keeping code and execution on the remote machine.

Andrew Lock explains how to build and publish custom Docker Sandbox templates so AI-agent sandboxes start with the tooling you need, including an example that installs the .NET SDK and a more advanced approach that swaps the base image while reapplying the sandbox layering.

Hidde de Smet explains how Spec-Kit’s extension system works, highlights useful community extensions, and walks through the Ralph Loop extension, which runs a GitHub Copilot agent in iterations to implement tasks from `tasks.md`, commit changes, and track context in `progress.md`.

Andrew Lock explains how to run AI coding agents in Docker Sandboxes using the sbx tool, so you can use “dangerous”/YOLO-style agent modes while keeping your host machine isolated, with practical setup steps, network policy notes, and git workflow tips.

Jesse Houwing explains why he rebuilt the Azure DevOps Marketplace publishing tasks from v5 to v6, focusing on faster builds, stronger testing, GitHub Actions support, and more secure authentication (OIDC/workload identity) while using GitHub Copilot’s Coding Agent to accelerate the rewrite.

Emanuele Bartolesi explains how to keep repositories in sync during a Git migration (for example, GitLab to GitHub), and why `git push --all` + `--tags` is not the same as `git push --mirror`, especially when it comes to non-branch refs and deletions.

John Edward provides a comprehensive look at agentic AI in IT, showing how Microsoft Azure and related services create self-healing and intelligent operations through automation, monitoring, and AI-driven incident response.

DevClass.com covers the alpha launch of npmx, an open source alternative browser for the npm registry led by Daniel Roe. The article discusses developer pain points with npmjs and how npmx addresses them.

John Edward outlines the core pitfalls of microservice architecture and offers actionable architectural patterns like API Gateway, Saga, and Circuit Breaker to help architects navigate complexity, deployment, and security concerns in distributed systems.

Jesse Houwing introduces the Actions Example Checker, a GitHub Action that validates documentation examples against action.yaml schemas to help developers keep their documentation in sync with actual implementations.

DevClass.com summarizes Filippo Valsorda’s critique of GitHub Dependabot, highlighting the alert fatigue and security concerns faced by developers using automated dependency management tools.

Andrew Lock explores how to collect and process application metrics in .NET using MeterListener from System.Diagnostics.Metrics. He explains the MetricManager pattern, in-process aggregation, and visualizing metrics with Spectre.Console.

In this workshop summary, DevClass.com reviews Martin Fowler’s event marking 25 years since the Agile Manifesto, highlighting the growing impact of AI on coding, the renewed importance of TDD, and security risks in software development.

DevClass reports on Godot maintainers dealing with a surge of low-quality, LLM-generated pull requests, and summarizes community reactions plus GitHub’s planned and existing controls (like PR restrictions and upcoming PR deletion) to reduce review burden.

DevClass.com explores GitHub’s preview release of agentic workflows, detailing how AI agents automate repository tasks. The article, authored by DevClass.com, breaks down security, configuration, and use case scenarios for this new automation concept.

Emanuele Bartolesi shows how to use GitHub Copilot as a guardrail for generating strict Conventional Commit messages in VS Code and JetBrains Rider, with concrete instruction snippets you can paste into each IDE to make the output consistent and automation-friendly.