Chapter 1, Microsoft Azure – Cloud Platform and Services, is all about learning the benefits of PaaS in the DevOps culture, and Microsoft Azure – cloud platform and services. It will cover all the PaaS offerings from Microsoft that are required for deploying a web application. This chapter also covers the basic concepts of Microsoft Cloud that are important for creating, using, and managing platform services effectively for deploying applications.

Chapter 2, Getting Started with Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), introduces the VSTS and the sample application structure that is necessary to understand before automating the process of building and deploying an application in a desired environment. It also explains how to use VSTS to manage versions of code and integrate VSTS with Eclipse IDE so the check-in process can be managed directly from the IDE.

Chapter 3, Continuous Integration with VSTS, explains how to configure the application code for automated compilation, unit test case execution, and notifying important stakeholders of the status of the build execution in case of failures and success. It also creates a package file and stores it in a shared folder. After this chapter, we will be ready for deployment if the build execution is successful.

Chapter 4, Continuous Development with Microsoft Azure Web Apps, covers App Service (Microsoft Azure Web Apps) in detail. Web Apps is used to deploy an application in the process of continuous delivery and continuous development. It covers how we can create different environments that can be used to deploy web applications. It also covers a brief description of database services and providing secure access to all resources using role-based access, which is significant from the security and governance perspective.

Chapter 5, Azure App Service Environments, is bit more theoretical, but covers a premium service of Microsoft Azure platform that can be used for specific use cases that Azure Web Apps may not be able to handle effectively. It not only covers creating ASEs but also provides a detailed comparison of Azure Web Apps and ASE to enhance security. Security is one of the most important parts of application life cycle management, and hence this service increases the value in the context of DevOps.

Chapter 6, Continuous Delivery to Azure Web Apps and ASE Using VSTS, presents how to deploy an application in Azure Web Apps and App Service Environment using VSTS. It also includes the security and governance aspect while deploying is different environments to ensure that only authorized persons can perform the deployment operation, and the process has to be verified. This chapter will cover end-to-end automation visualization for deploying an application in the PaaS offering of Microsoft Azure.

Chapter 7, Continuous Monitoring in Cloud Platform, covers another stepping stone in achieving end-to-end automation, and that is continuous monitoring. We cover the importance of it in different ways to monitor and troubleshoot Azure Web Apps and ASE so we can ensure that the application remains issue-free and highly available.

This book assumes that you are familiar with at least the Java programming language. Knowledge of core Java and JEE is essential if you want to gain better insights from this book. Having a strong understanding of the deployment of a web application in application servers such as Tomcat will help you to understand the flow quickly.

As the application development life cycle will cover a lot of tools in general, it is essential to have some knowledge of repositories, as well as IDE tools such as Eclipse, and build tools such as Ant and Maven. Knowledge of code analysis tools will make your job easier in configuration and integration; however, it is not vital to perform the exercises given in the book. Most of the configuration steps are mentioned clearly.

You will be walked through the steps required to get familiar with VSTS, Microsoft Azure Web Apps, Microsoft Azure App Service Environments, and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.

For Microsoft Azure, you can use a one month trial access. VSTS also comes with a trial account with some restrictions.

This book is specially aimed at developers, technical leads, testers, and operational professionals, who are the target readers and will want to jump start Microsoft Azure PaaS offerings such as App Services and SQL Database to host applications. Readers are aware of the issues faced by development and operations teams as they are stakeholders in the application life cycle management process. The reasons to jump start Microsoft Azure PaaS and VSTS are to understand the importance of their contribution to continuous integration, automated test case execution, and continuous delivery for effective application life cycle management.

No prior experience with continuous integration, cloud computing, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment is assumed. You may be a novice or be experienced with continuous integration tools such as Jenkins and Atlassian Bamboo.

This book covers continuous integration, cloud computing, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment for a sample Spring-based application. The main objective is to see end-to-end automation and implement it on the Microsoft technology stack that can be extended further based on the understanding gained from this book.

 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: "We can achieve this using the <ipSecurity> element."

A block of code is set as follows:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <security>
      <ipSecurity allowUnlisted="true" denyAction="NotFound">
        <add allowed="true" ipAddress="xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"      
          subnetMask="255.xxx.xxx.xxx"/>
      </ipSecurity>
    </security>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<configuration>
  <system.webServer>
    <security>
      <ipSecurity allowUnlisted="true" denyAction="NotFound">
<add allowed="true" ipAddress="xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"
          subnetMask="255.xxx.xxx.xxx"/>
      </ipSecurity>
    </security>
  </system.webServer>
</configuration>

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: "To create a resource group, click on Resource groups in the left-hand sidebar menu."

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