Ken Muse

The support for custom features in Dev Containers is a huge improvement to the process of customizing images quickly and easily. The convenience and simplicity can have a cost -- performance. Trying to customize a container using a feature recently, I struggled with an incredibly long build time. This is how I improved the process.

Continuing with the discussion of mastering Azure, it's time to understand how the Azure VM SKU families are named. Most people don't realize that each letter is actually associated with a mnemonic that is designed to make it easy to identify the ideal workload. In addition, the complete SKU name is designed to tell you key details about the VM capabilities in a way that's easy to remember.

While I was at VS Live Nashville, I heard the same question multiple times: if you're new to Azure, how do you get started? There are nearly 300 different services, and the numbers continue to grow. That's a lot to try to understand without a roadmap. I have a few suggestions to make the learning process more manageable ...

Git's safe directory configuration helps to protect users, but it can create challenges. This is especially true when using Hugo with Azure Static Web Sites. In that case, you're dealing with an Action that bind-mounts the source code into a container. This requires some special handling.

GitHub Actions allows you to create matrix builds to execute steps multiple times with different parameters. Fun tip -- those parameters can be dynamic. You can define them programmatically!