Book Image

Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions AZ-400 Exam Guide - Second Edition

By : Subhajit Chatterjee, Swapneel Deshpande, Henry Been, Maik van der Gaag
Book Image

Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions AZ-400 Exam Guide - Second Edition

By: Subhajit Chatterjee, Swapneel Deshpande, Henry Been, Maik van der Gaag

Overview of this book

The AZ-400 Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions certification helps DevOps engineers and administrators get to grips with practices such as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), containerization, and zero downtime deployments using Azure DevOps Services. This new edition is updated with advanced topics such as site reliability engineering (SRE), continuous improvement, and planning your cloud transformation journey. The book begins with the basics of CI/CD and automated deployments, and then moves ahead to show you how to apply configuration management and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) along with managing databases in DevOps scenarios. As you make progress, you’ll explore fitting security and compliance with DevOps and find out how to instrument applications and gather metrics to understand application usage and user behavior. This book will also help you implement a container build strategy and manage Azure Kubernetes Services. Lastly, you’ll discover quick tips and tricks to confidently apply effective DevOps practices and learn to create your own Azure DevOps organization. By the end of this DevOps book, you'll have gained the knowledge needed to ensure seamless application deployments and business continuity.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Digital Transformation through DevOps
5
Part 2 – Getting to Continuous Delivery
9
Part 3 – Expanding Your DevOps Pipeline
15
Part 4 – Closing the Loop
18
Part 5 – Advanced Topics

Agents and agent queues

The build definitions that you have created so far can contain agent jobs, which in turn contain tasks. These tasks are not executed within your Azure DevOps organization directly but are instead executed by agents that run on VMs or in containers. In turn, agents are grouped in agent pools. There are two types of agent pools that you can work with:

  • Built-in agent pools
  • Self-hosted agent pools

Let’s go through them one by one.

Built-in agent pools

Built-in agent pools are managed by Microsoft and are made available to you as part of the Azure DevOps product itself. There are different agent pools available, depending on your needs. Pools run different versions of Windows and Visual Studio, and there are also pools available that run Linux (Ubuntu) and macOS.

The disadvantage of these managed pools is that you cannot install extra software on the machines or containers that host the agents if you need to. This means that, in...