Azure DevOps Tutorial : Why Should You Use DevOps On Azure?

DevOps places a strong emphasis on improving communication and trust between developers and system administrators. As a result, the firm is better able to match technology projects with business needs. The entire team starts to understand that the changes implemented are typically minor and reversible.

DevOps is pictured as an endless cycle that includes the following steps: plan, code, build, test, release, deploy, operate, monitor, then go back to plan, and so on.

DevOps is the need of the hour and many organizations are wanting to incorporate this approach to make their businesses function better. Azure is one of the leading cloud service providers and supports a powerful set of DevOps services. This article on Azure DevOps helps you unravel the implementation of DevOps using Azure. You can learn more with the Azure DevOps Course.

We would be discussing the following pointers here:

1. What is Azure?
2. What is DevOps?
3. Why go for Azure DevOps?
4. Components of Azure DevOps
5. Using Azure DevOps to Create a CI/CD Pipeline
6. Azure DevOps Best Practices

Let us get started then,

What is Azure?

A company that provides different services to cater to Cloud Computing needs, is known as a cloud service provider. Amongst the various cloud service providers or vendors is Microsoft Azure.

Microsoft Azure is a platform for Cloud Computing that is created by developers and IT professionals at Microsoft. It lets you build, deploy and manage applications through their globally owned network of data centers.

These are some of the core service domains that Microsoft Azure impacts. Those are:

• Compute
• Storage
• Networking
• Databases
• Monitoring

Now Let us continue with this Azure DevOps blog to understand what is Devops?

What is DevOps?

Going by the definition,

DevOps is the process of integrating Developer and Operation teams in order to improve collaborations and productivity. This is done by automating workflows and productivity for continuous measurement of application performance.

This definition might seem ambiguous to beginners because there are a lot of unexplained terms there, let us try and understand those first.

Faster delivery of software deployment has become the need of the hour. Because the software market these days is volatile and you need to stay updated and ensure you deliver the best and the latest software and this can be achieved by continuous delivery and integration. This is where roles of software developers and system administrators become very important. Further understanding of Microsoft Azure can be obtained from the Azure Certification.

A software developer is the one who develops the software. They have to ensure a software has following parameters taken care of:

• New features
• Security Upgrades
• Bug Fixes

A developer however has to take ‘time to market’ under consideration and the time constraint forces him to re-adjust his activities like:

• Pending code
• Old code
• New products
• New features

And this is what happens when the product is put into the production environment, it may exhibit some unforeseen errors. This is because the code written in the development environment which can be different from the production environment.

Now let us see the same scenario from the operators perspective:

This team looks after the maintenance to ensure appropriate up time of the software to the production environment. With the growing software development needs, administrators or operators are forced to take care of many servers in parallel.

Now, the tools that were used to manage the earlier amount of servers may not be sufficient to manage the growing number of servers. The operations team makes minor changes to the code so that it can fit into the production environment equally well as it did in the developer environment. Thus these deployments need to be scheduled properly to avoid delays.

When the code is deployed the responsibility of an operator increases even further, they are required to manage code changes and errors if any. At times it may seem like developers have forced their responsibilities to the operations side. This is where the problem lies and if these teams could work together a lot problems would be solved like they:

• could break down silos
• share responsibilities
• start thinking alike
• work as a team

This is what DevOps does, it bring in these two teams under one roof. Now I believe the definition we saw at the beginning of the section, makes a lot more sense.

Now let us see what makes Azure a good fit to use DevOps and what makes Azure DevOps a good choice?

Why go for Azure DevOps?

We all know Azure is a leading cloud service provider and is definitely the need of the hour. Following features by Azure ensure DevOps is implemented in the best possible way:

Catalyze cloud development

You can now worry less about creating pipelines and focus on software development. Whether it is about dealing with pipelines, creating new ones or managing the existing ones, Azure provides end to end solution for the same and thus speeds up the process of software development.

Better Reliability and Continuous Integration

Now you don’t have to worry about managing security and infrastructures and you can focus more on developing innovative solutions. With Azure and CI/CD it supports, you can harness and use infrastructure as code which boasts of tools like Azure Resource manager or Terraform—that help you create repeatable deployments which also meet compliance standards.

Freedom Of Customization

With Azure providing end to end solutions for your software development you have the freedom of using the tools of your choice as Azure readily incorporates with most of the market tools out there thus making customization and experimentation easier.

Above reasons make Azure a highly compatible and preferable option for DevOps. Let us now understand what are the components that make Azure DevOps a good combination.

Components of Azure DevOps

Following are the Azure DevOps Components:

• Pipelines
• Boards
• Artifacts
• Repos
• Test Plans

The best way to get an in-depth understanding about Azure with the Azure Cloud Engineer Certification. Let us understand them one by one:

Azure Pipelines

So what is an Azure Pipeline? Well in simple words it is a pipeline supported by Azure platform where you can build, test and deploy applications continuously.

Azure Boards

If you have multiple teams working on a project, those teams need to communicate better. Azure Boards ensure better work tracking. Lets you deal with backlogs and also ensure creation great custom reports. To know more, Check out our Azure DevOps Course Online today.

Azure Artifacts

Azure enables you to create, host, and also share packages among your team. Artifacts in Azure ensure your pipelines have fully integrated package management. This can achieved with a mere click. You can also create Maven, npm, and NuGet packages. Here the team size does not matter.

Azure Repos

Think of it as a home or a storage for repositories. It provides you with unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repositories. You can pull, push and commit your changes to these repositories.

Azure Test Plans

It provides you with a complete toolkit to perform end to end, manual and exploratory testing ensuring your software functions just fine.

Example Implementation: Using Azure DevOps to Create a CI/CD Pipeline

Here is a scenario that offers advice on architecture design for creating a pipeline for CI/CD. The sample below employs a two-tiered web application, which is deployed to Azure DevOps and related services like the App Service through a continuous integration and deployment pipeline. Utilizing this strategy enables you to concentrate on application development rather than infrastructure management.

The following data flows are part of the scenario:

1. A change is made to the source code of the application by a developer.
2. The developer adds the web configuration file and the application code to the Azure Repos source code repository.
3. Azure Test Plans are used by the continuous integration system to launch the application build procedure and execute unit tests.
4. Using the configuration variables appropriate to the environment, the continuous deployment component of Azure Pipelines automatically deploys the application artifacts.
5. The artifacts are sent to the App Service by the pipeline.
6. Application Insights gathers and examines information regarding the performance, health, and usage of the application.
7. The application information is managed and monitored by the development team.
8. To prioritize bug fixes and new features for Azure Boards, the team consults the backlog.

Azure DevOps Best Practices

The following best practices can assist in maximizing Azure DevOps’s capabilities.

Organize the project teams

Each team can use the tools provided by Azure Boards to plan and monitor its progress. It provides feature-specific teams and sets default teams for each project. By clearly defining teams, each project team may function autonomously while fostering collaboration.

Establish sprints

The sprint cadence of a project, which is typically one to four weeks, is defined by project teams using sprints, which are established using Iteration Paths. Release pipeline hierarchies are compatible with sprints. Each sprint is an assignment that a particular team is responsible for completing by the assigned due date. Businesses should establish realistic sprint schedules that the entire team can adhere to, with a minimum of six revisions (i.e., for a six-month plan).

Support Tags for Searches and Filtering

Ad hoc work-item tags can be applied by project teams, allowing team members to search for work items and filter boards and backlogs based on tags. General usage instructions should be provided via the tags.

Here is an image of a Kanban board that displays things with the tag “Web” thanks to a web keyword filter.

       IMAGE: AZURE

Organizations should put policies in place that outline how teams should use tags. These tags help identify interdependence across teams and can facilitate filtering and reporting.

Go through the Features Board.

The Features board reviews DevOps teams and managers have a way to assess the status of a project and guarantee a steady stream of deliverables. Using the Features backlog, you can track changes quickly and visually.

Here’s an example of a features board that has been altered with “In progress” columns added to show the many stages of designing, developing, and deploying features to production.

          IMAGE: AZURE

Multiple teams can review features for shared projects using an interactive board by configuring project delivery plans. The Features board can be customized by organizations to support team-specific workflows. Viewers can narrow their emphasis on a labeled item based on features, particular sprints, etc. using the filter feature. The Feature backlog’s rollup columns can be used to track a project’s overall development.

Using current work management systems to Migrate or Integrate

A wide range of existing work management solutions can be linked with Azure DevOps tools:

This was about Azure Components. If you wish to know more about Azure DevOps and want to know how to develop CI/CD pipeline then you refer to the video below:

So this is it guys, this brings us to the end of this article on Azure DevOps. Likewise, if you are interested in AWS and you wish to take your expertise in AWS DevOps to the next level and get certified in the domain, then you might want to take a look at this Professional Certificate Program in DevOps training on ‘AWS Certified DevOps Engineer‘ by Edureka which is specially catered to help individuals gain expertise in the domain.

If you do have any queries, you can put those in the comment section below and we would revert at the earliest.