Chapter 6, Source Code Control, provided detailed insight into the working of source code configuration management. Chapter 7, Configuration Management and Chapter 8, Configuration Management and Operational Validation, dealt with practices, principles, and implementation of application and infrastructure configuration management with the help of the Online Medicine sample application. The focus of this chapter is on another important practice of DevOps, that is, continuous integration.
Continuous integration is one of the main pillars of DevOps, directly effecting the application life cycle management of a project. This chapter will discuss continuous integration in depth. It will focus on the necessity of continuous integration, some of its important principles and implementation, and the configuration of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) to automate continuous integration.