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

Chapter 6: Hosting Your Own Azure Pipeline Agent

In the previous two chapters, we looked at setting up continuous integration through Azure Pipelines while using Microsoft-hosted agents. In this chapter, we'll be building a self-hosted agent and updating the pipeline to use our own agent, rather than using the Microsoft-hosted one.

We will first look at the types of pipeline agents available and then dive into the technical specifications of setting up the agent pools. We will also look at how you can use VM scale sets for large-scale Azure DevOps projects.

We'll be covering the following topics:

  • Azure pipeline agent overview
  • Understanding the types of agents in Azure Pipelines
  • Planning and setting up your own pipeline agent in Azure
  • Updating your Azure pipeline to use your self-hosted agent
  • Using containers as your self-hosted agents
  • Planning for scale – using Azure VM scale sets as self-hosted agents