1) When you say built automation to spin up clusters in AKS, what did you use and what entry point you used to spin up those cluster? E.g: Did you have a terraform template that was used through cli?It's pretty much all ARM templates and AzDO pipelines. No Terraform. We're only just now starting to go down the path of evaluating Terraform to become part of our automation stack.
2) How were the Helm files deployed? Did you have a CD pipeline that deployed helm on every code commit?
Git repos in AzDO and AzDO pipelines. I don't know if any teams are deploying with every single commit or not, but there's definitely a set of AzDO pipelines for building the code, pushing the images to DTR (or ACR) repos, and running the Helm deployment.
3) When you said iterating on the app directly on AKS, what was the iteration? Is the scope, you had an existing app and you were iteratively porting the code base?
I don't know how to answer that. It was a very ad-hoc, "figuring it out as we go" kind of thing.
On a meta level, how many of your experience you and your team preferred a UI/UX experience for?
I'm not sure. I know there are people who do like going into the portal and doing stuff, but it's not my cup of tea. And my role was on a team that provided supporting services in a kind of "cross-cutting concerns" sense, not a team that owned a specific user-facing application. So I don't have complete visibility into how all the various AppDev teams chose to do certain things.
For creating helm charts, did you feel like a portal experience would have made it easier or did existing documentation work for you?
For us, we basically had a small group of people who developed the first series of Helm charts, and published them. Once that existed, I think a lot of other teams just took those artifacts and used them as a template and modified them to suit their project.