Book Image

Azure DevOps Explained

By : Sjoukje Zaal, Stefano Demiliani, Amit Malik
5 (1)
Book Image

Azure DevOps Explained

5 (1)
By: Sjoukje Zaal, Stefano Demiliani, Amit Malik

Overview of this book

Developing applications for the cloud involves changing development methodologies and procedures. Continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) processes are a must today, but are often difficult to implement and adopt. Azure DevOps is a Microsoft Azure cloud service that enhances your application development life cycle and enables DevOps capabilities. Starting with a comprehensive product overview, this book helps you to understand Azure DevOps and apply DevOps techniques to your development projects. You'll find out how to adopt DevOps techniques for your development processes by using built-in Azure DevOps tools. Throughout the course of this book, you'll also discover how to manage a project with the help of project management techniques such as Agile and Scrum, and then progress toward development aspects such as source code management, build pipelines, code testing and artifacts, release pipelines, and GitHub integration. As you learn how to implement DevOps practices, this book will also provide you with real-world examples and scenarios of DevOps adoption. By the end of this DevOps book, you will have learned how to adopt and implement Azure DevOps features in your real-world development processes.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: DevOps Principles and Azure DevOps Project Management
4
Section 2: Source Code and Builds
9
Section 3: Artifacts and Deployments
12
Section 4: Advanced Features of Azure DevOps

Introduction to Feature Flags

You can use a Feature Flag to turn features in your code, such as specific methods or sections in your code, on or off. This can be extremely helpful when you want to hide (disable) and expose (enable) features in a solution. Features that are not complete and ready for release yet can be hidden or exposed in the solution. This allows us to test code in production for a subset of users. You can enable the code for a subset of users, for instance, based on the login name of the user and let them test the features before releasing them to others. However, there is a drawback to Feature Flags: they introduce more complexity in your code, so it is better to constrain the number of toggles in your application.

The recommended approach when creating Feature Flags is to keep them outside the application. For instance, a web or app configuration file is a good place to add Feature Flags because you can change them easily, without the need to redeploy the application...