What Is Azure Pipelines & Its Benefits To Your DevOps 

Numerous organisations have started using Azure DevOps for their deployments. It is an all-inclusive package that offers a broad spectrum of services covering their projects’ entire development life cycle. Azure Pipelines is one of the notable features of DevOps, which also defines the Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment processes that support Containers and Kubernetes.

As a leader, your main objective may be to increase your productivity and make the deployment process as simple as possible for the growth of your organisation. This approach makes Azure Pipelines a valuable asset to have at your disposal.

Understanding Azure Pipelines

A pipeline is an automation tool that helps your developers compile, build, and deploy codes on other computational platforms. While using Azure Pipelines, there will be no manual intervention as all changes you make will be implemented automatically. This is because whenever a human handles any repetitive part of the process, there are high chances of mistakes. Microsoft has based these pipelines on two strong foundations, CI and CD. 

Continuous Integration

CI assists in catching bugs and issues in the early stages of your project’s development life cycle, where fixing them is straightforward. CI makes minor changes and then merges them in larger codes to make corrections easy. CI makes it easier to define and manage workflow when working with teams as your code is continuously compiled and tested in the background. With the help of CI, you can make the integration process smoother to improve productivity.

Continuous Delivery

CD assists you in automating your delivery process by integrating the source code with your organisation’s preferred server infrastructure. CD will deploy the code in the defined environment after ensuring that all tests are performed and policies are followed. Your developers can instantly deliver new features and bug fixes and configure the required changes accurately. You can configure CD to help your developers in calling routine software deliveries.

How Azure DevOps Pipelines Work

Azure DevOps Pipelines require a trigger for initialisation. Since a pipeline can have numerous stages, you can simultaneously deploy a pipeline to single or multiple environments. While managing jobs, a stage needs to be specified as each stage can run numerous jobs concurrently. An agent, which is a computing architecture, will execute the job; however, it is possible to run a job without an agent where required.

As an agent takes up a job, it will perform all defined steps. These steps can include independent scripts or tasks that are considered an integral part of the pipeline. A task is a pre-bundled script used to publish a build artifact or call a REST API. As your project moves through the pipeline repeatedly, you can monitor all of your logs to see if any error pops up.  

Benefits of Azure Pipelines

Azure DevOps Pipelines extend numerous benefits to their users; some of them are:

1. Version Control Systems

As you create a CI/CD pipeline, you need to insert your code into a version control system. If you need help managing your source code, consider signing up for a Git repository such as GitHub. Developers often leverage Git repositories to support Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC).

2. Programming Languages and Application Types

Your developers can use Azure DevOps Pipelines with every type of application and numerous programming languages such as Python, Java, Ruby, or C. It is possible to deploy pipelines on any OS such as Linux, macOS, and Windows.

3. Deployment Targets

Your developers can deploy CI/CD pipelines with applications on environments having numerous targets such as on-premises or cloud platforms, virtual machines, Azure services, or container registries.

4. Pricing

While working on public projects, you can use Azure DevOps pipelines free of charge; however, you will be allowed 1800 minutes of free pipeline jobs every month if you are working on private projects. If your project requires more pipeline jobs minutes, you will have to buy a monthly subscription from Microsoft.

5. Progressive Deployment  

Azure DevOps Pipelines allows you to set numerous stages in the development and testing phase to ensure the quality of your project as you progress. You can pinpoint bugs, understand problems as they occur, and resolve them instantly.

Conclusion

Microsoft has designed Azure DevOps to simplify the workflow as the project moves through its development lifecycle. As a leader, Azure pipelines is essential for the growth of your organisation as it can help you speed up the development process and ensure on-time delivery of your project.

However, if you rely on finding errors manually, it’s time to move ahead and eliminate this time-consuming process and shift to Azure. A1 Technologies is a certified Microsoft partner, specialising in Microsoft Cloud solutions.  Our Microsoft Certified Azure Specialists team is available to assist you with all of your Azure Pipelines needs and queries.

Clint Shiels

With over 20 years in the technology space and a background focused on Microsoft and Security, my methodology is to understand business requirements and outcomes first and foremost then set out a roadmap and delivery plan to achieve these through advisory and modern workplace delivery services.