Azure DevOps: An introduction

What is DevOps?

DevOps stands for Development and operations. It has become the default go-to methodology for IT organizations and teams. DevOps emphasizes shortening the development life cycle of software products and services by integrating the functions of development and Information Technology(IT) operations. The main aim of DevOps Services is to ensure uninterrupted delivery of services with top-notch quality that is devoid of errors or other glitches.

What is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps is a Software as a Service (SaaS) DevOps toolchain from Microsoft for developing, testing, and deploying your applications with an optimized release cycle for delivery of software applications. It enables you to track your software development process and integrate it with most of the tools that are available on the market thus enabling you to deliver quality applications and software to the end-users. Azure DevOps includes tools that are discussed below.

1) What's Azure Pipeline

It is a cloud-hosted pipeline for continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery or continuous deployment (CD) that is platform-independent. Azure pipeline has components for build, library, and release. It is independent of language and allows developers to build and deploy Android, iOS, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET applications and run the applications in parallel on operating systems like Linux, macOS, and Windows. It facilitates the continuous delivery of your software applications to any cloud platform. It enables you to deploy containers as well as build and push images to the container registry.

2) Azure Boards

It helps you to plan, discuss, and track your work. It is an agile tool that manages your work with the Kanban board, backlogs, reporting, etc. You can track your ideas at every stage of the development cycle and align your team with the code changes. Developers can employ built-in scrum boards to enable your team to run sprints. It offers a set of powerful analytics tools that helps you to gain better insights into the status of your ongoing development projects.

3) Azure Artifacts

Azure Artifacts enables developers and teams to efficiently share the code. You can use universal artifact management for Maven, Python, npm and create and share feeds from cloud instances. Developers can share packages from different feeds and registries. You can share your packages even publicly also apart from sharing with your teams.

4) Azure Repos

This service provides you with unlimited Git repositories. It enables you to securely connect and push code into your cloud-hosted Git repositories from an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) or editor. You can add extensions using Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interface (REST APIs). It also offers semantic search options based on objects and classes.

5) Azure Test Plans

It offers exploratory testing solutions that are automated to improve the quality of your code. You can test your software applications on your PC or web applications. Planned manual testing enables you to execute and track scripted tests with end-to-end traceability.

Benefits of Azure DevOps

1)Reliability

Azure DevOps being a SaaS offering provides you with an uptime of 99.9% and is globally available.

2)Access the Latest Set of Features

Users get access to the latest set of features every three weeks.

3)No Need to Worry About Upgrades

End users and clients need not worry about patching and upgrading their applications.

4)Platform and Cloud Agnostic

Supports languages like C/C++, Node.js, Python, Java, .Net, Ruby, etc to develop your applications to be deployed on Linux, Windows, macOS. Azure DevOps works with a wide range of cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon AWS, etc.

Conclusion

Azure DevOps is a DevOps service based on the cloud that enables developers to create reliable and scalable applications that can be deployed anywhere and not constrained by factors like a programming language, cloud platform, etc thus enabling developers to deploy their applications faster. For DevOps Consulting / any DevOps service, talk to our team at Activelobby