Book Image

Azure DevOps Explained

By : Sjoukje Zaal, Stefano Demiliani, Amit Malik
Book Image

Azure DevOps Explained

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

Exploring branching strategies

A branch is a version of your code stored in an SCM system. When using SCM with Git, choosing the best branching strategy to adopt for your team is crucial because it helps you have a reliable code base and fast delivery.

With SCM, if you're not using branching, you always have a single version of your code (master branch) and you always commit to this branch:

Figure 3.4 – One flow

This "one flow" way of work is not recommended because it cannot guarantee that the master branch is stable, especially if you have more than one developer working on the same code.

There are different branching workflows (strategies) that you can adopt for your team, and the recommendation that normally I suggest is to start simple. With Git, there are three main branching strategies that you can adopt:

  • GitHub Flow
  • GitLab Flow
  • Git Flow

In the following sections, we'll explore each of these strategies...