While developing a product, every developer in a team knows how to build an integral part of the software lifecycle. But a mechanism is required to merge the codes of different developers in a single branch. The functional productivity of software developers has been one of the most critical challenges faced by a company. Using an automated build and testing system will not only increase productivity but also speeds up the time to market for the product. Microsoft’s team has provided Azure DevOps Automated Deployment services for fulfilling the above purpose. This blog hence demonstrates the Automation with Azure DevOps.

What is Azure DevOps?

Bringing innovation in the software lifecycle, Microsoft evolved Azure DevOps under the flagship integrated environment known as Visual Studio Team Service (VSTS). Adding development (Dev) with operations (Ops), Azure DevOps is an integrated platform that facilitates automated building, development, testing, integration, and deployment. It consists of a full spectrum of DevOps tools such as containers, CI/CD, GitHub, configuration management, etc.

The biggest advantage provided by Azure DevOps is App Modernization which includes migrated legacy applications to azure modernized applications. Azure DevOps is rich in providing inbuilt functionalities that help in effective project management by automating their workflows.

Azure DevOps Components

Both private and public cloud configurations are supported by Azure DevOps and hence has 5 major components:

Azure Boards: Deliver value to the users by providing tools to teams to track, plan, work status, and detect bugs throughout the entire software development lifecycle. It consists of 3 basic items: Epics, Issues, and Tasks.

Azure Repos:Provides unlimited sets of repositories to facilitate version control (VCS) and coordinate code changes with your team. Allow you to manage code, version control, build, push, commit, pull, and provides all the related branching information.

Azure Pipelines:Combination of Continuous Integration(CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) that supports automatic building, testing, and deploying of your code. Needs to be connected with GitHub for automation.

Azure Test Plans:Tools used to successfully test your applications. You can also create and run your test plans as per your needs.

Azure Artifacts:Create and consume packages from different sources and share them with your team. Also allows you to add artifacts to your pipelines created.

Tools Provided By Azure DevOps Automated Platform

Integration with tools and languages:

Microsoft Azure MFA allows you to integrate third-party open-source tools and services with DevOps. For example, for message app notifications you can integrate DevOps services with Slack, Microsoft Teams, HipChat, and many more. This facility will deliver high-quality software timely and faster.

CI/CD Tools:

You can directly use Azure Pipelines to deploy with CI/CD. But if there is a requirement where you want to use your own custom CI/CD tool then Azure DevOps provides support for an open-source server called Jenkins. With Jenkins, you can set up your continuous integration/continuous delivery tool to build apps and deploy them in the cloud. For providing an integration facility in Azure, you can set up Jenkins in Azure for providing automation with Azure.

Automating Infrastructure and Configuration Management Tools:

Provision and Manage Azure infrastructure from your third-party tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Terraform for Automating Infrastructure and Configuration Management.

Ansible: Ansible is a configuration management tool that helps you to provision virtual machines, containers, configuration management, and deploy applications.

Chef: Chef Automate is a solution that helps you to build, deploy, and manage your infrastructure throughout your team. It enables compliance and management of various changes occurring.

Puppet: To automate the entire software’s lifecycle on cloud or on-premise use Puppet Enterprise that helps you to provision, configure, and manage Azure.

Terraform: Arranging all the cloud resources such as accounts, storage, virtual machines, networking, etc and organizing the Azure infrastructure, use Terraform cloud.

Benefits of Automation with Azure

Reduced upfront investment

Optimized workflows

Reliable service

Pay as you go after receiving benefits of azure automation

Global deployment

Integration with websites, servers, storage, etc

Reduced time to market of your product

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