Host multiple Minecraft instances on an Azure VM


by RobinPaardekam

My son is very active on Minecraft for years now. We decided to move away from running Minecraft Server on my Synology NAS and instead we set up a Virtual Machine on Microsoft Azure. The power of the NAS just wasn’t sufficient to run more than 1 instance. On the NAS I had run the server both native as well as in Docker containers over time. However: he wanted to run 3 instances simultaneously, for different purposes, so I decided it was time to leave the NAS (as far as it concerned Minecraft at least) and provide him with a dedicated VM in the cloud.

Running the server itself is a piece of cake. There are a few things you need to take into account though. Of course my son is not running the plain vanilla server: he wants all kinds of special versions, plugins, mods, you name it. However: for the sake of readability I am not going into all of that in this article, and my examples will show only the vanilla version of Minecraft Server.

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Paardekam Skyline Git Azure DevOps

Migrating Subversion to VSTS Git


by RobinPaardekam

I was asked to migrate an on-premise Subversion repository to cloud-hosted Git for quite a large project. There was a lot to find out so I did many attempts and experiments until I finally managed to migrate the complete repository including all history, branches and tags. As this process took me weeks or even months to complete, I will not go into too much detail, but the steps necessary to complete the job are listed below for your, and my own, future reference.

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Paardekam Skyline Rotterdam PowerShell DevOps

Invoke TFS 2015 REST API from build- and release-tasks


by RobinPaardekam

I ran into a technical challenge writing a custom task for TFS 2015, which I solved by calling the TFS 2015 REST API from my build- and release task. I’ll try to explain why and how I did that in this post. There might be other options as well, please feel free to share them with me. Continue reading “Invoke TFS 2015 REST API from build- and release-tasks” →

Paardekam Skyline Rotterdam PowerShell DevOps

Writing a custom TFS 2015 build task


by RobinPaardekam

At my current assignment I am working purely in a DevOps role. The biggest chunk of my day-to-day work is the migration of an on-premise TFS 2013 instance to on-premise TFS 2015, including process template changes, migration to the new build eco-system (so moving away from XAML templates) and introducing new functionality as SonarQube etc. As the new build-system is fairly new, there is not that much information on the web yet about writing your own build steps, so I thought it could be helpful to others as well if I wrote down my findings. Continue reading “Writing a custom TFS 2015 build task” →