Azure DevOps

• Formerly called as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

• Azure DevOps provides developer services to support teams to

  • plan work
  • collaborate on code development
  • build applications
  • deploy applications

• Azure DevOps provides the following Services

  • Azure Repos:
    • Git Repositories or TFVC for source control of your code
  • Azure Pipelines:
    • Provide build & release services to support ci/cd
  • Azure Boards
    • Suite of agile tools to support planning & tracking work, code defects and issues.
  • Azure Test Plans:
    • Provides tools to test apps.
    • It support manual testing and continous testing
  • Azure Artifacts:
    • allows the team to share Maven, npm and Nuget Packages from public and private sources and integrate package sharing into CI/CD

• Azure DevOps is available as

  • Azure DevOps Services:
    • This is a hosted solution
    • Quick setup
    • Comes will all the servcies mentioned above
  • Azure DevOps Server
    • On-Premise installation is required
    • Refer Here for installation

• Create a Git Repository for the project using New Repository Section.

• To Setup the build just click on Setup Build and Select Maven, The Pipleine will start building the code. sounds simple.

• Now lets look at what happens. Azure Pipelines will create a file called as azure-pipelines.yml in the root folder of version control which looks as shown below\

# Maven
# Build your Java project and run tests with Apache Maven.
# Add steps that analyze code, save build artifacts, deploy, and more:
# https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/languages/java

trigger:
- master

pool:
  vmImage: 'ubuntu-latest'

steps:
- task: Maven@3
  inputs:
    mavenPomFile: 'pom.xml'
    mavenOptions: '-Xmx3072m'
    javaHomeOption: 'JDKVersion'
    jdkVersionOption: '1.8'
    jdkArchitectureOption: 'x64'
    publishJUnitResults: true
    testResultsFiles: '**/surefire-reports/TEST-*.xml'
    goals: 'package'

• Now lets try to understand how to write this kind of a file.
• Note: Azure DevOps is very well documented Refer Here

Concepts of Azure Pipelines

• Lets look at the basic workflow Refer Here
• To write a pipeline we need to understand YAML Refer Here and YAML Schema for Azure DevOps Refer Here
• Now lets see the equivalent Jenkinsfile for the above azure-pipelines

pipeline {
    agent {
        label: 'ubuntu-latest'
    }
    stages {
        stage('packagepetclinic'){
            steps {
                sh 'mvn package'
                junit '**/surefire-reports/*.xml'
            }
        }
    }
}

Pools and Agents

• Configuring Agents and Pools
• We have two options for pools
  • Self Hosted:
    • This can be any virtual machine/physical connected to internet and then we need to configure the agent
  • Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets: Azure vmss can automatically scale up/down to handle build loads
• Lets configure a self hosted agent
• Now follow the steps to download the agent.
• Detailed instruction for configuring agent Refer Here
• To configure the Agent we require PAT