Devops 2021: Having a look and understanding Azure Devops

DevOps 2021: Diving into Azure DevOps

What is Azure DevOps?

We know that DevOps is a practice that helps in bridging the gap between the developers and IT operations that enhance the overall development lifecycle. But what if we implement the DevOps approach to a cloud? It is where we use Azure DevOps to fulfill the need for DevOps needs to the cloud.

Azure DevOps is a Software as a Service (SaaS) from Microsoft, which offers an end-to-end DevOps toolchain to develop and deploy applications. It works with other available tools to orchestrate the DevOps toolchain. Many organizations have implemented Azure DevOps that fit their market needs irrespective of the language, platform, or cloud. Azure DevOps provides a flexible platform, platform, and cloud-agnostic.

Azure DevOps was launched in October 2018, but it is not a new product for the Devops ecosystem. Its presence can be traced back to the Microsoft visual studio team services (VSTS) in 2006. Azure DevOps comes with a new feature set that is now used by millions of users.

Azure DevOps has a lot of inbuilt functionality that allows teams to get up and running with managing their project and automating their workflows to increase productivity with a very short initial learning curve.

Azure DevOps is simply a suite of SaaS services, consisting of Azure Boards, Azure Pipelines, Azure Repos, Azure Test Plans, and Azure Artifacts — providing teams with the feature parity of tools like Jenkins, CircleCI, Octopus Deploy and others. Keeping in mind the fact that Azure DevOps also integrates and supports many providers, 3rd party tools and services, ready out-of-the-box, organisations can either use all those services or use what they need to achieve their goals.

You can also refer to our previous posts on the Azure Cloud Terminology that covers some of the important Azure services.
A look at Azure Cloud terminology – Part 1
A look at Azure Cloud terminology – Part 2
A look at Azure Cloud terminology – Part 3

What can Azure DevOps do?

Azure DevOps offers a variety of services that covers the complete Devops lifecycle spectrum end-to-end. Below are some key services provided by Azure.

Azure Pipelines
It is a CD/CI platform that supports the Kubernetes container. It allows you to create and test the code automatically. To work with the Azure pipeline, the source code have to be in the version control system. You can work with languages like Python, Ruby, Java, etc.

Azure Boards
In the multiple teams environment where communication is a must, that ensures better productivity. Azure Board allows the team member to collaborate to track the work and its progress over the development cycle. It enables you to go down the backlogs and ensures creating efficient, customized reports.

Azure Artifacts
It allows you to manage packet movement with the help of different language feeds from various sources. It ensures that the packages are shared among your team members. Artifacts provide this package management in Azure. To implement Artifacts in Azure, the size of the team does not matter.

Azure Repos
Azure Repos are like repositories that provide cloud-hosted private Git repos. It allows you to make changes like push, pulls, and commit to the saved repositories directly.

Azure Test Plan
It offers integrated planned and exploratory testing solutions for your application. It comes with a complete toolkit that allows you to test your software to check its functioning.

Benefits of Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is used because it combines both the cloud and DevOps approach to ensure faster and efficient delivery. It offers immense benefits to any organization working for software delivery. Some of the benefits are mentioned below.

Speed

With the DevOps approach, different teams can take ownership of various tasks and release updates faster and efficiently.

Rapid Delivery

All the processes and tools are working together with DevOps and the cloud approach. This combination will ensure faster deployment and testing of applications using automated tools. It ensures that all changes will get committed immediately and promotes the rapid delivery of the application.

Reliability

Azure DevOps is entirely reliable, scalable, and globally available. It provides monitoring and logging services that keep every team up-to-date with real-time information. It is backed by 24X7 support and gives 99.9% SLA uptime.

Scaling

Azure DevOps offers management services that efficiently manage your development and testing in a production environment.

Platform and cloud-agnostic

Azure DevOps provides you with the ability to work on any platform and with any language. Aside from this, Azure DevOps offers you to work with AWS and GCP cloud services.

Improved collaboration

It provides a platform for both developers and Operation teams to collaborate to deliver the project effortlessly. Every team member works as a group, having designated tasks, and other teams are aware of their working for up-to-date information and project progress.

Security

With the automated processes and regulatory compliance, the data being shared and worked on are all secure.

Conclusion:

So if you are one the verge of picking up a Cloud based Devops solution or planning to make a leap in 2021, trying to explore and experiment in your staging or dev environments before finally opening the switch to your production, I would suggest to have a serious consideration about Azure Devops. As discussed it includes all the tools and solutions that can provide you an end-to-end solution for your Devops implementation and also make it much more smooth and faster.