All you need to know about Azure DevOps

Overview

By combining teams, procedures, and technology to produce an ever-evolving software development lifecycle (SDLC), DevOps has opened the way for quicker and more agile software development processes. As a result, SDLCs have become more resilient and efficient, with the ability to handle any user request, market need, or technology challenge.  

A variety of technologies are available on the market to help with DevOps, including CI/CD solutions, version control systems, artifact repositories, IaC tools, and monitoring tools. Because of the rising need for cloud-based technology, DevOps tools have also moved to the cloud. These cloud products provide practically limitless scalability and efficiency to teams located all over the world.  

In this blog, we will look at Azure DevOps, a Microsoft cloud-based DevOps solution.  

What is Azure DevOps?

The abbreviation “Dev” and “Ops” refers to the replacement of segmented Development and Operations. The goal is to form interdisciplinary teams that can collaborate using common and efficient procedures and technologies. Agile planning, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and application monitoring are all essential DevOps strategies.  

Azure DevOps is a Microsoft service based on the Azure cloud computing platform that provides a comprehensive set of tools for managing software development projects. It is made up of five core services and a large marketplace with extensions for extending the Azure DevOps platform and integrating with third-party services.  

Core Azure DevOps Services

Azure DevOps services comprise the following:   

1. Azure Boards
2. Azure Pipeline  
3. Azure Repositories 
4. Azure Test Plans 
5. Azure Artifacts 

Azure DevOps is offered in two flavors:

• Microsoft Azure DevOps  
• A cloud-based server 

Microsoft Azure DevOps Server

The Team Foundation Server (TFS), formerly known as the Azure DevOps Server, is a DevOps server solution designed for on-premises installations. It is made up of all the resources accessible in the Azure DevOps service, a cloud-based platform for enabling DevOps pipelines. 

In addition, this server includes a free version called Azure DevOps Server Express, designed for single developers and small teams of up to five people. It is installable in any setting.  

All commercial DevOps services, including paid user-based extensions, have a 99.9% availability guarantee through Azure. Additionally, it offers 99.9% availability to carry out load testing as well as build and deploy activities in premium Azure Test Plans (Load Testing Service) and Azure Pipelines.  

Pricing for Azure DevOps

When selecting any DevOps solution, pricing will be one of the main factors to consider.  

There are both free and premium versions of the cloud-based Azure DevOps services. Furthermore, there are two types of service offerings: individual services and whole service packages.  

In addition to the above, there are other price options for open-source projects and Visual Studio users who can use Azure DevOps services for free (depending upon the level of subscription).  

*For information & current price, visit the Azure DevOps pricing page – https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/ 

Azure DevOps: Sign up

You simply need a Microsoft account to register for Azure DevOps, which is an easy and clear procedure. Visit their website and select “Start for free.”  

You must fill out some more information during registration, such as the name of your organization, project, the kind of version control (repo), etc.  

Organization is the name of the Azure DevOps account.   

Projects allow users to separate projects, limit access, and divide the code, tests, and pipelines to keep them within the assigned projects. They also allow for separating projects, managing access, and splitting the pipelines.  

Git or Team Foundation server may be used as the version control system for either a public or private project. A work item methodology, such as Agile or Scrum, may also be defined for projects so that it can be utilized in Azure Boards to manage the project.  

Following successful registration, you will receive a unique organization URL with the following notation: https://organization name>.visualstudio.com. By going to this URL, users may manage all of their projects and make use of the DevOps services.  

Azure DevOps Services

Five services make up Azure DevOps, which we’ll examine in this section. All of these services may be categorized under certain projects, allowing users to maintain appropriate separation between various projects that make use of various technologies and address various needs.  

Azure Boards  

Project management is centralized in the Boards service in Azure DevOps. Boards may be utilized by team members for collaboration, planning, and tracking. The Boards team may use Azure to build custom dashboards, work items, Kanban boards, backlogs, and reports to track every part of the project.  

Using the built-in reporting and monitoring capabilities, you may also create boards to precisely meet the needs of the workflow and acquire insightful information. Additionally, Azure Boards offers first-party connections with Slack and Microsoft Teams, enabling effective ChatOps.  

Azure Repos 

The Azure Repos are code repositories that let users manage their codebases. These are cloud-based, private repositories that can handle both the Git and the TFVC version control systems.  

Any project, from small-scale hobbies to large-scale business initiatives may be supported with Azure Repos. They also include the following characteristics:  

• Direct integration with CI/CD technologies   
• Support for all Git clients (IDE, Text Editor, CLI)  
• Semantic Code Search 
• Collaboration Tools for Team Members 
• Branch Policies to enforce code excellence requirements  

Users of repos can interact with Azure Repos on any operating system using whatever IDE or tool they are accustomed to. 

Azure Pipelines  

Automated building, testing, and deployment are made possible by the CI/CD technology known as pipelines. Users may build pipelines that support Windows, Linux, and macOS utilizing cloud-hosted agents; as Azure Pipelines support every programming language and platform.  

Through the expansions that are readily accessible in the marketplace, these pipelines are easily deployable. They also allow sophisticated processes that may be utilized to facilitate:  

• Multi-phase builds
• Test integrations
• Functions for customized reporting

Furthermore, Azure Pipelines offer native container functionality, allowing users to send containers directly to container registries through the pipeline. The pipelines allow for flexible deployment to a variety of environments, including Kubernetes clusters, serverless operations, and even alternative cloud providers like AWS or GCP.  

Azure Test Plans  

The Azure DevOps feature called Test Plans enables customers to include a cloud-based testing platform to handle all testing requirements, like:  

• Planned manual testing 
• User acceptance testing (UAT) 
• Exploratory testing 
• Obtaining opinions from key players  

Users using Azure Test Plans, you may write test plans and run test cases inside of a pipeline. This may be used with Azure Boards to produce a test that can be run from Kanban boards and to jointly plan and write tests.  

Azure Artifacts  

The Azure DevOps artifact library service may be used to build, store, and share packages (development artifacts). Using Azure Artifacts, customers may add fully functioning package management capabilities to CI/CD pipelines.  

Additionally, Azure Artifacts give customers the ability to handle various package types, including npm, maven, etc., and keep them organized in a single library that is exclusively focused on the specific project. 

Azure provides cloud-based DevOps services

One of the top cloud-based DevOps services, Azure DevOps offers a complete set of tools for building and managing a whole DevOps process. It enables users to:  

1. Attend to every DevOps demand independent of the targeted platform’s programming language, technology, or other factors 
2. Use any deployment method, including third-party clouds and containers

All of these are made possible by the unmatched scalability and availability of Azure DevOps, which eliminates the complexity of maintaining different pieces of software for each individual DevOps operation.  

Conclusion

The Azure DevOps certification is for individuals who wish to demonstrate their knowledge of designing and implementing Microsoft DevOps solutions. Candidates for this test are developers or infrastructure administrators; with subject matter knowledge in working with people, processes, and products to ensure ongoing value delivery in businesses. DevOps engineers must have prior expertise with Azure administration and development, as well as significant abilities in at least one of these domains. They should be familiar with Azure DevOps as well as GitHub.  

I hope you found this information useful and wish you the best of success!    

If you have any queries, please post them in the comments area below.  

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