In my career I have worked for many organizations where we would launch all of our updates at once, both from the operational side and the development teams. This was messy. Through my career I started looking at new ways to do things. Deploying smaller, more incremental changes. I also found ways to automate easy tasks in my infrastructure so that I could actually take a vacation or have a sick day. I started with PowerShell, then really started to embrace Infrastructure as Code.
As I was automating more and more, I needed to stop deploying these things manually as well and find a way to automate things further. I started to then learn about automated deployment, we call this CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery). It enabled me to deliver automation to my infrastructure along with testing my deployments and helping me plan my projects. There are a lot of tools out there that can help you do all of this, but we are going to focus on the tool Azure DevOps.
Why Azure DevOps? Because it is more than just CI/CD. It is devised of 5 major components that delivers features that are really mature when it comes to CI/CD tooling. With these features you can plan, store and deploy your code. Azure DevOps is a tool that every member of your technical teams can use, not just your developers. Azure DevOps allows you to deliver ANY LANGUAGE to ANY PLATFORM. Whether you have on-premises datacentres or are deploying to any public cloud (Azure, GCP and AWS), Azure DevOps can deliver to anywhere!
Azure DevOps is made up of the following components:
- Azure Boards – The complete project planning and tracking tool
- Azure Repos – A secure repository to keep your code, wiki and project documentation
- Azure Pipelines – CI/CD tooling that delivers pipelines to any environment
- Azure Test Plans – Create custom tests and track results
- Azure Artifacts – Store and share packages
Here is a complete video tutorial that covers all of the components of Azure DevOps. In this tutorial we start with the basics, ensuring that if you've never touched this application, you can get started easily. Even a more seasoned user will find something new, we wanted to make sure we included something for everyone. Over the next few weeks, I will break down each component from the video into more detail, getting more advanced and showing you some great features.
Watch the video below to learn how Azure DevOps can accelerate your project delivery and automation tasks:
Enjoy the video and watch out for the next blog where I go into further detail about Azure Boards, an awesome tool in Azure DevOps that allows for project planning, tracking and communication amongst your technical teams.
