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 the types of agents in Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines offers two types of agents:

  • Microsoft-hosted agents
  • Self-hosted agents

Let's look at them in detail.

Microsoft-hosted agents

Microsoft-hosted agents are fully managed VMs, deployed and managed by Microsoft. You can choose to use a Microsoft-hosted agent with no additional pre-requisites or configurations. Microsoft-hosted agents are the simplest and are available at no additional cost.

Every time you execute a pipeline, you get a new VM for running the job, and it's discarded after one use.

Self-hosted agents

Self-hosted agents are servers owned by you, running in any cloud platform or data center owned by you. Self-hosted agents are preferred due to various reasons, including security, scalability, and performance.

You can configure your self-hosted agent to have the dependencies pre-installed, which will help you decrease the time for your pipeline execution.

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