Introducing Azure DevOps

DevOps enables teams to quickly respond to changing business needs and deliver high-quality software and services with greater speed and reliability. The goal of DevOps is to promote faster, more efficient delivery of software and services by breaking down the traditional silos between development and operations teams and aligning their processes and tools.

DevOps is a term that combines the words “development” and “operations.” It is a cultural and operational approach that emphasizes collaboration and communication between development and operations teams.

The following diagram shows the main phases of the application life cycle:

In the following sections, we’ll explain these phases and the corresponding Microsoft tooling and products in more detail.

Plan

The planning phase is where teams determine what work needs to be done. In this phase, they can use tools like Azure Boards and GitHub too:

• Define and track tasks using Kanban boards and backlogs in Azure Boards.
• Create issues in GitHub to track bugs or suggest new ideas.
• Organize and assign issues to team members.

These tools help teams keep track of their work and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Develop

The development phase involves writing and testing code. During this phase, teams can use the following tools:

• Visual Studio Code: a cross-platform code editor.
• Visual Studio: an IDE for Windows and Mac.
• Azure DevOps: for automated testing and build automation.
• Azure Pipelines: to automatically build source code.

Teams can share code using Azure DevOps or GitHub, making it easier to collaborate and ensuring everyone has the latest version of the code.

Delivery

The delivery phase focuses on deploying applications and services to target environments. Teams can use the following tools to do so:

• Azure Pipelines: to deploy code automatically to Azure services or on-premises environments.
• Azure Resource Manager templates: to create environments for applications or infrastructure components.
• Terraform: to create infrastructure as code.
• Jenkins and Spinnaker: to integrate with Azure DevOps Pipelines.

These tools help teams automate the deployment process, ensuring that applications and services are deployed consistently and reliably.

Operate

The monitoring phase involves monitoring the performance and health of applications and services. Teams can use the following tools to do so:

• Azure Automation: to manage cloud environment with automation.
• Chef: to automate infrastructure and applications.
• Azure Policy: to enforce compliance and define resource standards.
• Azure Security Center: to keep applications and services secure.

These tools help teams ensure that their applications and services are running smoothly, meet compliance standards, and are secure.

In Short

Azure DevOps provides a comprehensive set of tools and services to support the entire software development life cycle. Teams can use Azure DevOps to manage the entire development process, from analysis and design to deployment and maintenance. With Azure DevOps, teams can access a range of integrated features, such as Kanban boards, backlogs, build pipelines, testing tools, and more, from any web browser. This makes it easy for teams to collaborate and manage their work, regardless of location or device. Azure DevOps helps teams streamline their development process, increase efficiency, and deliver high-quality software and services quickly and reliably.

Why DevOps?

Before going further, we need to understand why we need DevOps over the other methods.

Before DevOps, the development and operations teams worked in isolation, which led to several problems:

• Longer delivery time: The testing and deployment phases consumed more time than the actual build cycle.
• Inefficient use of time: Team members spent a large amount of time on design, testing, and deployment, rather than building the project.
• Human errors: Manual code deployment increased the risk of human errors in production.
• Timing misalignment: The coding and operations teams had separate timelines, leading to further delays.

DevOps helps to solve these problems by promoting collaboration and communication between development and operations teams. With DevOps, teams can streamline their processes and use automation to reduce the time and effort required to deliver high-quality software and services. DevOps enables teams to respond quickly to changing business needs and deliver software and services with greater speed and reliability.

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