This year, we decided to re-launch our website and renew the blog. The goal of the blog still remains the same, we still want to inform you about the latest news around the Microsoft technology stack as well as DevOps tools and processes.
Why?
Our old website was based on a rather heavy-weight CMS and therefore was hard to maintain and didn’t fit our goal to have a simle way to provide content to our customers and visitors. Times changed and the tools around static websites were getting better and better. So, long story short, we decided to go on with Jeykll and generate a static site each time something changes in the website’s repo. So all authors can focus on the content and write simple markdown files. Besides the simplicity we also gain performance compared to the CMS we used before.
Technology behind the scenes?
We manage the websites content in a git repository. Authors (and yes, we have only technical authors who do not fear to use a code editor and write markdown) work on their content on a feature branch and then create a pull-request to publish. The pull-request is reviewed and, if ok, we use a Jekyll docker image to generate the actual website. For this autoamtion we use VSTS. The generated website is handed over as a build artifact to the release automation where the actual content gets deployed to a staging website and then, after approval, to production. Simple as that.
But what about the details?
Stay tuned! If you are interested in a deep dive of our setup, we will deliver some posts in the near future.