Azure DevOps

DevOps has paved the way for faster and more agile software development practices by unifying teams, processes and technologies to expedite the software delivery. A range of products are available in  market to facilitate DevOps principles like CI/CD tools, SCM tools, containerisation tools etc. With increased demand to cloud computing , Devops tools have transitioned to Cloud based offerings as well. In this post, we are going to discuss one of such offering by Microsoft called Azure Devops. 

  

      Azure DevOps is a platform that supports collaborative culture and provides an integrated set of services that manages your software development lifecycle  starting from planning, developing, testing and deployment. In this post, we will discuss about Azure Devops and its different functionalities . 

Snippet above  provides us valuable insights about different functionalities of Azure DevOps but let's first understand what is Azure DevOps.           

      Azure DevOps is a Software as a Service(SAAS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end toolchain for software development lifecycle.  It was formerly known as Visual Studio team services i.e. VSTS. It amalgamates all the DevOps practices and tools required to provide highly efficient, one-stop solution for entire software lifecycle to enable continuous delivery to your end users.

                                                          

It provides the following key services as shown in the snippet alongside -

1. Azure Repos

2. Azure Pipelines

3. Azure Boards

4. Azure Test Plans

5. Azure Artifacts

Each of these services help the teams to plan, build, test and deploy their code in order to shorten the software release cycle. Along with this, Azure DevOps provides integration with several other third-party tools via Azure marketplace to enhance its functionality. Hence, developers are not bound to use only Microsoft tool stack . They are free to integrate their pipelines using the tool extension of  their choice. Lets discuss briefly about each of its key Service.

1. Azure Repos

Unlike any Source control repository, Azure DevOps provide Azure repos as its Source control repository so that developers can check-in their source code here and take the build process from here onwards. 

2. Azure Pipelines

This service enables Azure Devops to act as an orchestration tool. Using this service, developers can create Build and Release pipelines. Build pipelines are meant to take the code from source code repository and generate an artifacts out of it. We can integrate these pipelines with third-party tool extensions in order to enhance the functionality of our pipeline. For example - integrating our pipeline with Sonarqube extension helps us to execute static code analysis which further helps us to get a report about our code quality. In the similar fashion, we as a developer can create Release Pipelines which are meant to deploy code to multiple environments as required. These Release pipelines get artifacts from Build pipeline and get that artifacts deployed to environments we configured.

3. Azure Boards

It is the management hub of the project.  Boards can be used to plan, track and collaborate between team members. One can easily navigate through boards in order to understand the current status of the project. Developers can create work items, backlogs,Kanban board and even integrate it with other third-party tools like Slack to use it to maximum.

4. Azure Test Plans 

It is test management module within Azure DevOps that lets users manage test plans, test suites and test cases for everyone in the software development process. Furthermore, test plans enable users to test on any platform while having end-to-end traceability and powerful data gathering tools to diagnose any remedy identified issues.

5. Azure Artifacts

It is artifact library service used to create, store and share packages within a team, across the organisation and publicly.  This way it enable users to integrate fully-featured

package management functionality to CI/CD pipelines. Moreover, it supports all package types like npm,Maven etc  and keep them organised in a central library .

This is a brief introduction about Azure DevOps and key functionalities that it offers to scale the business growth without much hassle of managing multiple tools for planning, collaboration, testing and development. Since it provides a one stop solution for all the software needs be its a dashboard ( or Boards)that enables project planning, repos to store the source code etc.

I hope this article provides valuable insights about Azure DevOps and its core services.