What is Azure DevOps

• Azure Devops server (formerly Team Foundation Server and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS)) is a Microsoft product that provides version control, reporting , requirements management, project managament , automated builds, testing and release management capabilities
• This covers the entire application lifecycle and enables DevOps capabilities.
• Azure DevOps is offered as
  • Azure DevOps Services:
    • This is a hosted solution on microsoft azure
  • Azure DevOps Server:
    • This is a installation that can be done on the on-premisies Refer Here
• Azure DevOps has the application lifecycle defined as shown below
• During the Plan phase, teams use Backlogs or Kanban boards to define, track & layout the work that needs to be done for Application in Azure Boards. We also create a SCM system that can be GitHub or Azure Git Repos
• During the Development Phase, we create Azure Pipelines to create automated builds from the source code. We can use visual studio code to create pipelines for building the code
• During the deliver phase, we deploy applications and services to the target environments. We use terraform or ARM templates to create infrastructure
• During the operate phase, we implement montoring for applications and services
• For Creating an Azure DevOps Service environment Refer Here
• Create a new project in Azure DevOps

Understanding Azure DevOps Services

• The following are the different Azure DevOps Services
  • Azure Boards:
    • They are used to plan, track and discuss work across teams using Agile planning tools that are available
    • Teams can manage their software project with native support for Scrum and Kanban
    • You can alos create customizable dashboards
  • Azure Repos
    • They support Git repository hosting and also Team foundation server version control.
  • Azure Pipelines
    • We can azure pipelines to automatically build, test and deploy code and make it avalilable for other targets
  • Azure Test Plans:
    • With Azure Test plans, teams can use the features offered to plan manual test, explorartory tests and user acceptance testng and gathering feedback from stack holders
    • Tests are organized as test plans and test suites by tester and team leads
  • Azure Artifacts:
    • With Azure Artifacts, we can create and share Nuget, npm, Python and Maven packages from public and private sources with teams in Azure DevOps
  • Extension Marketplace

Azure Git Repos

• Exercise: Create a new project in Azure Devops and create a new repository and add gameoflife source code into the Newly added repository.
• I want all the commits of master branch from github Refer Here into Azure DevOps Git repo

Azure Pipelines

• Azure pipeline is a cloud service offered by Azure platform to automate building, testing and releasing phases fo your development cycle (ci/cd)
• Azure pipelines works with the following schema
• To use Azure pipelines, we need to create a pipeline. A pipeline in Azure DevOps can be created in two ways
  • Using the classic interface
  • Using a YAML
• In Jenkins to define the pipeline we created a Jenkinsfile where we had option to create a scripted pipeline or declarative pipeline
• In the case of Azure devops we create a azure-pipelines.yml file to define the pipeline
• Refer Here for the azure pipeline yaml schema
• Azure pipeline can be represented as
• A pipeline starts from a trigger ( a manual , a push inside repository or schedule)
• Pipeline is generally composed of one or more stages
• Each stage contains one or more jobs
• Each job runs on a Agent and it has steps.
• Each step is composed of task that performs some action.
• the final output of the pipeline is an artifact

Build agents

• To build and deploy code using Azure Pipelines, we need atleast one agent.
• Agent is a service that runs the jobs defined in pipeline.
• Execution of these jobs occur directly on agent’s host machine
• When defining agents for the pipeline, we have two possible agents
  • Microsoft-hosted agents: This is a service managed by Microsoft and its cleared on every execution of pipeline
  • Self-hosted agents: This is a service which you setup and manage yourself. This can be a custom vm on Azure or on-premise. In the self-hosted agent you need the install the necessary softwares to perform builds. A self-hosted agent can be a windows, linux , mac or Docker container
• Microsoft Hosted Agents:
  • Refer Here for the agent pool images and labels that can be used to build the project
• Lets create a sample pipeline by clicking on setup build and selecting maven
• Now if we review the azure-pipelines.yaml file created

Next Steps

• JSON and YAML Tutorial Refer Here
• Create a pipeline for .net builds by authoring yaml files
• Create a pipeline for java builds by authoring yaml files
• configure self hosted agents.