An Introduction to Azure DevOps
4 min readJul 1, 2022
DevOps is a software development practice that promotes collaboration between development and operations, resulting in faster and more reliable software delivery. Commonly referred to as a culture, DevOps connects people, process, and technology to deliver continuous value.
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. It also integrates with most leading tools on the market and is a great option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain.
Azure DevOps Components
Azure DevOps comprises a range of services covering the full development life-cycle as:
- Azure Boards: agile planning, work item tracking, visualization and reporting tool. Azure Boards provides software development teams with the interactive and customizable tools they need to manage their software projects. It provides a rich set of capabilities including native support for Agile, Scrum, and Kanban processes, calendar views, configurable dashboards, and integrated reporting.
- Azure Pipelines: a language, platform and cloud agnostic CI/CD platform with support for containers or Kubernetes. Azure Pipelines automatically builds and tests code projects to make them available to others. It works with just about any language or project type. Azure Pipelines combines continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to test and build your code and ship it to any target.
- Azure Repos: provides cloud-hosted private git repos.
- Azure Artifacts: Azure Artifacts enable developers to consume and publish different types of packages to Artifacts feeds and public registries such as NuGet.org and npmjs.com.
- Azure Test Plans: provides an integrated planned and exploratory testing solution. Azure Test Plans provides rich and powerful tools everyone in the team can use to drive quality and collaboration throughout the development process.
Azure DevOps Features
- Develop: To manage our workspace and code repository multiple types of version control (TFVC) are already integrated with Azure DevOps.
- Release: Azure DevOps has already multiple types of inbuilt features to make the process easy and risk-free.
- Monitor: Each phase of the DevOps life cycle should be monitor because it helps to ensure the health, performance, and reliability of your application.
- Testing: Azure DevOps provides multiple types of inbuilt testing templates and management tools.
- Planning: Azure board is an ALM tool. So Azure board helps us to maintain an Agile process which means Azure DevOps helps us to plan, track development history for individual developers and detects issues using a Kanban and scrum.
- Integration/Build: We can use continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) with the help of the Azure pipeline. There are multiple types of job agents, and templates are already available inside.
- Package: An inbuilt extension available, Azure Artifacts, so we don’t need any type of packages.
- Configure/Operate: Azure DevOps has a simple process to configure organization, kanban, sprints, etc.
- Reporting: Azure DevOps has a dashboard where we can see reports, a summary and can generate an analytical report with BI integration.
That’s all for this article.
Happy Coding!!
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