Chapter 1, Introducing DevOps, introduces the motivation for implementing the DevOps paradigm in any software development endeavor. The chapter focuses on practices and principals at a high level, creating the context for other chapters in the book.

Chapter 2, DevOps Tools and Technologies, walks through the major technology components important from a DevOps implementation perspective. It discusses cloud technologies, build and release management services, Git, Windows Server 2016, Docker containers, and Nano servers. This chapter provides a brief introduction to each of these technologies.

Chapter 3, DevOps Automation Primer, walks through major automation technologies, enabling faster and better DevOps implementation. This chapter provides a brief introduction to PowerShell, Azure Resource Manager templates, Pester, and Desired State Configuration.

Chapter 4, Nano, Containers, and Docker Primer, focuses on new Windows Server 2016 features such as Nano servers, containers, and Docker. It provides an introduction to these technologies with examples. The chapter shows how to provision Nano servers using Azure PowerShell, containers using Azure Resource Manager template, and working with Docker and dockerfiles.

Chapter 5, Building a Sample Application,  introduces a sample application that helps in showing and implementing DevOps practices. It is an ASP.NET MVC web application consisting of a frontend and a database. The chapter also discusses important technical components that are integral to the sample application.

Chapter 6, Source Code Control, discusses the importance of using a version control system and provides multiple ways to interact and work with Visual Studio Team Services using Git. It shows ways to check-in the sample application into Git, and multiple ways to interact and work with VSTS Git repositories using Visual Studio. It also provides a small primer into working with Git using commands.

Chapter 7, Configuration Management, introduces one of the most important DevOps practices and its implementation. It discusses the concept of Infrastructure as Code and its importance. This chapter focuses on infrastructure and application configuration management. It provides descriptions of the code, scripts, and configuration used for the sample application. The sample application will be deployed using these configuration management artifacts.

Chapter 8, Configuration Management and Operational Validation, continues where the last chapter ended. It shows implementation of Infrastructure as Code, along with unit testing and the operational validation of environments.

Chapter 9, Continuous Integration, discusses another important DevOps practice and provides details about its importance, principles, benefits, and implementation. Visual Studio Build pipelines are discussed extensively while providing details about a sample build pipeline built for the sample application.

Chapter 10, Continuous Delivery and Deployment, discusses two of the most important DevOps practices and provides details about their importance, principles, benefits, and implementation. Visual Studio Release pipelines are discussed extensively while providing details about a sample release pipeline consisting of multiple environments built for the sample application.

Chapter 11, Monitoring and Measuring, discusses at length the concepts and implementation related to monitoring and measuring the different aspects of applications and environments in the production environment for the sample application.

This book assumes a basic level knowledge on Windows operating system, cloud computing and application development using a web programming language, and moderate experience with the application development life cycle. The book will go through deployment of a sample application on Azure within Windows Containers using a set of virtual machine. This requires a basic understanding of cloud storage, computing, networking, and virtualization concepts on Azure. The book implements DevOps practices using Visual Studio Team Services and basic knowledge of this is expected, although this book tries to cover its foundations. If you have experience with Azure and Visual Studio Team Services, this is a big plus.

A valid Azure subscription and Visual Studio Team Services subscription is needed to get started with this book. They are both available free of cost on a trial basis.

As all deployments are made to the cloud, you will require a development environment on a local computer, consisting of:

This should be enough for the development environment.

In this book, you will need the following software:

Internet connectivity is required to work with chapters in this book.

The primary audience of this book are developers, IT professionals, enterprise architects, and software and solution architects who are shaping, implementing and designing strategies for their customers. DevOps engineers, IT operations professionals and students interested in learning and implementing DevOps  will find this book extremely useful.

To make full use of the content of this book, basic prior knowledge of a programming language, scripting language, containers, and cloud computing is expected. If you feel you do not have that knowledge, it is always possible to catch up on the basic requirements by quick reading the documentation available on the Internet at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Dockerfile is a file containing instructions to create an image"

A block of code is set as follows:

{
      "type": "Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts",
      "name": "[variables('vhdStorageName')]",
      "apiVersion": "2015-06-15",
      "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
      "tags": {
        "displayName": "StorageAccount"
      },
      "properties": {
        "accountType": "[variables('vhdStorageType')]"
      }
},

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

PS C:> docker --version
Docker version 1.12.2-cs2-ws-beta, build 050b611

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Right-click on *.westeurope.cloudapp.azure.com | Certificate | All Tasks and then Export."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of. To send us general feedback, simply e-mail [email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message. If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.

Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.