DevOps (Development and Operations) brings together people, processes, and technology, automating software delivery to provide continuous value to your users. Azure DevOps Services allows you to create, build, and release pipelines that provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your applications. You can integrate repositories and application tests, perform application monitoring, and work with build artifacts. You can also work with backlog items for tracking, automate infrastructure deployment, and integrate a range of third-party tools and services such as Jenkins and Chef. All these functions and many more are closely integrated with Azure to allow for consistent, repeatable deployments for your applications to provide streamlined build and release processes.

Some of the main DevOps services available with Azure are Azure DevOps Services, and Azure DevTest Labs.

Azure DevOps Services

DevOps Services provides development collaboration tools including high-performance pipelines, free private Git repositories, configurable Kanban boards, and extensive automated and cloud-based load testing. DevOps Services was formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).

Azure DevOps Services is a suite of services that address every stage of the software development lifecycle:

• Azure Repos is a centralized source-code repository where software development, DevOps engineering, and documentation professionals can publish their code for review and collaboration.
• Azure Boards is an agile project management suite that includes Kanban boards, reporting, and tracking ideas and work from high-level epics to work items and issues.
• Azure Pipelines is a CI/CD pipeline automation tool.
• Azure Artifacts is a repository for hosting artifacts, such as compiled source code, which can be fed into testing or deployment pipeline steps.
• Azure Test Plans is an automated test tool that can be used in a CI/CD pipeline to ensure quality before a software release.

Azure DevTest Labs

Azure DevTest Labs provides an automated means of managing the process of building, setting up, and tearing down virtual machines (VMs) that contain builds of your software projects. This way, developers and testers can perform tests across a variety of environments and builds. And this capability isn’t limited to VMs. Anything you can deploy in Azure via an ARM template can be provisioned through DevTest Labs. Provisioning pre-created lab environments with their required configurations and tools already installed is a huge time saver for quality assurance professionals and developers.

GitHub and GitHub Actions

GitHub is arguably the world’s most popular code repository for open-source software. Git is a decentralized source-code management tool, and GitHub is a hosted version of Git that serves as the primary remote. GitHub builds on top of Git to provide related services for coordinating work, reporting and discussing issues, providing documentation, and more. It offers the following functionality:

• It’s a shared source-code repository, including tools that enable developers to perform code reviews by adding comments and questions in a web view of the source code before it can be merged into the main code base.
• It facilitates project management, including Kanban boards.
• It supports issue reporting, discussion, and tracking.
• It features CI/CD pipeline automation tooling.
• It includes a wiki for collaborative documentation.
• It can be run from the cloud or on-premises

Most relevant for this module, GitHub Actions enables workflow automation with triggers for many lifecycle events. One such example would be automating a CI/CD toolchain.

References:

• Explore DevOps
• Choose the best tools to help organizations build better solutions

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