Introduction
DevOps is a methodology for software development that combines project management and collaboration. It enables software development teams to create products faster than conventional software development methods.
Azure DevOps Services offer a range of tools to help you plan, build, deploy, and test your application. These services include Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, and Azure Monitor.
1. Build
Azure DevOps Services (formerly Visual Studio Team Services) lets you quickly build, test, and deploy software. Its combination of development, IT operations, and quality engineering tools makes it an excellent choice for companies that want to release better products faster.
This tutorial shows you how to set up an automated CI/CD pipeline for a project that is hosted in a Git repository in an Azure organization. It also shows you how to create a release pipeline to automate the deployment of the result.
To set up a CI/CD pipeline, you need an Azure DevOps Organization URL and Personal Access Token (PAT). You also need a valid GitHub account with permission to access the repository.
2. Deploy
Azure DevOps Services help you configure release pipelines that continuously build, test and deploy your applications. It enables you to receive feedback on whether your changes contain syntactical errors, break existing tests, and save time by automating the deployment process.
A pipeline consists of steps (the smallest building blocks) defined by YAML code in your repository. These steps can run external scripts or pre-packaged tasks to build, test, deploy, and publish an app.
3. Monitor
Continuous monitoring is essential to any DevOps process, ensuring that all facets of the project are being reviewed and monitored. It also aims to identify areas for improvement and highlight any errors that might occur.
You can monitor Azure DevOps Services using several tools, including Application Insights. This tool enables you to review web traffic, investigate application performance, track application usage, and configure alerts.
4. Test
A suitable Continuous Delivery (CDI) pipeline can ensure that your software is consistently released. It is essential to your business as it avoids delays and errors when a product goes live, which can lead to revenue generation.
For CDI to work, your team must use a pipeline that supports automated builds and deploys of code to production. Azure DevOps Services helps you achieve this by providing tools that automate and manage software delivery pipelines.
The Azure Test Plans module within Azure DevOps Services lets you create, manage, and execute tests to validate milestones throughout the software development process. It also provides a browser extension to facilitate exploratory testing and gather stakeholder feedback.
5. Manage
Azure DevOps Services provides tools to help you plan, manage and track the work needed to deliver software projects. These include a version control and code repository, agile and scrum project planning, and continuous integration and delivery pipelines.
The tool also offers a range of built-in analytics reports. These are useful for visualizing workflow patterns and building dashboards that show the progress of an iteration or project.
Groups are crucial to access management and can be set up at the organization level or per project. They can be linked to a user's on-prem Active Directory (AD) or synced with an Azure AD account.
