MSDW Podcast: Tobias Fenster and Waldo on DevOps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

DevOps has changed a lot in the last decade. And in the world of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and its predecessor, Dynamics NAV, the DevOps landscape has absorbed many of those changes in just the last two to three years as Business Central emerged as a cloud-first SaaS ERP product.

Our guests on this episode, Tobia Fenster, a Microsoft MVP and Microsoft Regional Director and fellow MVP Waldo (a.k.a., Eric Wauters), discuss their experiences with DevOps for Business Central, including the tools and services they have created to improve the experience. Their work in this area has been driven by both a need to help their internal teams and to offer solutions for the broader BC developer ecosystem that take on a range of needs in areas like container management and automated build pipelines.

DevOps requirements are more sophisticated than ever, which means the tools are more powerful, but the concepts are also more complex. That rapid shift could be a direct risk both to partners and to BC customers that rely on customizations in the cloud. The situation remains quite manageable, Tobias and Waldo say, but development teams joining the BC community need to address the challenges straight away and understand the stakes,  for their own sake and for their customers.

Show Notes:

• 1:40 – Introductions to Tobias and Waldo
• 4:00  – How is the developer experience today different from the old days?
• 6:45 – Waldo’s outlook on embracing Extensions
• 10 :00 – How is the development community adapting to modern techniques?
• 13:30 – Who needs to have expertise in modern CI/CD and containerization for an ISV or a VAR organization?
• 18:00  – The origins of ALOps (created by Waldo) and its reception in the community
• 20:45 – Tobias’s experience as an ALOps early adopter and use of the tool at Cosmo Consult
• 25:15 – What are Waldo and Tobias are asking of Microsoft to strengthen DevOps
• 30:00 – What types of partner organization can benefit from finding an existing DevOps framework
• 33:00 – What, if anything, should customers and others in the community understand about these development topics and the impact on their systems?
• 37:00 – What to look for in the near future

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