Azure DevOps

Definition: Azure DevOps is the tool that lets the developers release the code in different environments in a more efficient, smoother, and faster way.

Why do you need DevOps?

If you need any of the following, you need DevOps.

• Improve your release process?
• Is there any increased frequency of releases and is difficult to manage accurately?
• Do you want to eliminate the manual deployment and release process?
• Do you want to increase the quality of your application?

Azure DevOps Suite of Services

1. Azure Boards:
   1. There are Azure Boards to allow project managers to keep track of work tasks, timelines, issues, and plan the full project timeline for a team.
   2. Discuss the work internally in the team and with the other teams.
2. Azure Pipelines:
   1. Azure Pipelines is for producing and testing your software and applications automatically every time a change is made.
   2. Deploy with CI/CD (Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery) that works with any language, platform, and cloud.
3. Azure Test Plans:
   1. Azure Test Plans lets you set up automated tests of your applications to make sure they won't break once users start using them.
   2. Manual and exploratory testing tools.
4. Azure Repos:
   1. Azure Repos is a secure and managed way to store all your source code for your applications.
   2. Unlimited, cloud-hosted, private, and public Git-Hub repositories.
5. Azure Artifacts:
   1. This is a way to share your applications and code libraries with other parties on your team or externally. And it's free.
   2. Create, host, and share packages.

Azure Dev Test Labs

• Where Azure DevOps focuses on the software and applications, DevTest Labs focuses on the environment they run on.
• You can quickly provision Dev and Test environments.
• You can set an automated shutdown to reduce the costs.
• You can build windows and Linux environments.
• You can set some quotas and policies to minimize the cost.
• You can automate the creation of environments.
• Azure DevTest Labs comes with a range of features to let you tailor each environment to your needs and set up templates to reuse environments over and over again.

GitHub

• GitHub was bought by Microsoft in 2018 and is, at its core, a code repository service.
• Lots of projects store their software code on GitHub to maintain it, keep it secure, share it, and manage it.
• GitHub is well known for hosting many open-source code repositories, meaning projects where you can see the code and often contribute to it.
• Microsoft is one of the biggest users of GitHub themselves, with all their major open-source projects, such as .NET Core and the Windows Terminal, hosted there.

GitHub Actions

• GitHub Actions is equivalent to Azure DevOps Pipelines.
• It allows you to build your code, test it, and then publish it to the live production environment when it passes all the tests.
• Just like Azure DevOps Pipelines, you can deploy to almost any kind of cloud platform and environments, such as AWS, Kubernetes, and Google Cloud Platform.