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

Understanding build agents

To build and deploy your code using Azure Pipelines, you need at least one agent. An agent is a service that runs the jobs defined in your pipeline. The execution of these jobs can occur directly on the agent's host machine or in containers.

When defining agents for your pipeline, you have essentially two types of possible agents:

  • Microsoft-hosted agents: This is a service totally managed by Microsoft and it's cleared on every execution of the pipeline (on each pipeline execution, you have a fresh new environment).
  • Self-hosted agents: This is a service that you need to set up and manage by yourself. This can be a custom virtual machine on Azure or a custom on-premise machine inside your infrastructure. In a self-hosted agent, you can install all the software you need for your builds, and this is persisted on every pipeline execution. A self-hosted agent can be on Windows, Linux, macOS, or in a Docker container.

Microsoft-hosted...