What is Azure DevOps?
It is a software as a service (SaaS) platform that offers end-to-end toolchains for the development and deployment of software.
DevOps is blooming and the most sought-after platform in the IT industry now. It is the set of practices/strategies that brings development and IT in collaboration with each other.
The main objective of Azure DevOps is to bring together operations, IT developers, administrators, testers, and QA teams of an organization. The team working at DevOps is the DevOps engineer team.
Azure DevOps Engineer?
The DevOps engineers along with developers and IT staff are responsible for managing code releases. They have a thorough understanding of the software development life cycle and various automation tools. The DevOps engineers are either deployed in networking and operations or coding and scripting.
For becoming a DevOps engineer, AZ-400 Certification is required and mandatory. To avail of this certification, the candidate has to pass the exam conducted by Microsoft.
The validity of this certificate is 1 year only. Ideally, the duration of the course is 6 weeks and it costs approximately INR 20,000.
Job positions/roles for Azure DevOps engineers:
1.Automation Expert
These engineers are responsible for achieving automation and orchestration of tools.
2.Security Engineer
The engineers, who maintain the health and security of the product.
3.DevOps Evangelist
An engineer who is responsible for DevOps implementation.
4.Quality Assurance Engineers
They ensure the quality of the products throughout the life cycle.
5.Release Managers
These engineers are responsible for releasing new features and post-release responsibilities of all products.
6.Software Developers
They develop and test software code.
Skills needed to be an Azure DevOps Engineer:
- Good knowledge of cloud environment, at least one cloud platform out of Azure, AWS, GCP.
2. Hands-on knowledge of configuration management and deployment tools like chef, puppet, ansible, etc.
3.Must know DevOps key concepts
4. Experience in the development of continuous integration(CI) and continuous delivery(CD) pipelines.
5. Must be proficient in scripting and Git workflows
6. Should have good knowledge of Linux fundamentals
7. Knowledge of different DevOps tools and technologies is preferred.
Why Azure DevOps usage is increasing in organizations?
This also means the benefits of DevOps that have created a huge demand for DevOps engineers and developers in the IT industry. There are innumerable advantages of deploying Azure DevOps in an organization.
Some of them are:
- It shortens the overall software development life cycle.
2. Increase in the adoption of microserver architecture in the industry.
3. Automated CI/CD pipelines facilitate the release of small features frequently
4. Lower rate of failure
5. Faster recovery in case of any failure
6. Freedom of customization
7. Speed up a cloud development
8. Reliable and continuous integration
DevOps is supported by agile software development that provides online training facilities to the candidates. The course is designed according to the current industrial demands. DevOps training modules include the following topics:
1.Through knowledge of DevOps, various techniques, and methods.
2.Making of production code on containerizing
3.creation of CI/CD pipelines
4.Complete execution of software version
5. creation and development of configuration with Ansible, puppet, etc.
6.automated building, releasing, and testing using Maven
7.Container orchestration using Kubernetes
8.Monitoring and performance tuning
Azure DevOps is not just a single program, but a suite of services. These services can be used either collectively or independently based on the requirement of the product.
The Services are:
- Azure Boards – They covers work planning, tracking, visualization, and reporting.
2. Azure Repos – they cover cloud hosted Git repository with the pull request, file management, and other benefits
3. Azure pipelines – This is a continuous integration(CI) and continuous delivery (CD) platform.
4. Azure artifacts – The artifacts provide developers with integrated package management from public or private sources.
5. Azure test plans – This provides an integrated testing solution.
What Are the Features of Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps services offer great features for development teams
- Dashboard Control: Using the DevOps dashboard feature, you can navigate to different areas of the project efficiently, add and manage dashboards, and configure dashboard widgets.
2. Improved Source Control: Azure DevOps systems support two popular types of source control: Git (distributed) or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC).
3. Plan and Track Your Work: Azure DevOps systems provide you with types of work items used to monitor features, requirements, user stories, tasks, bugs, and more.
For planning purposes, you can access several kinds of backlogs and boards to support the main agile methods: Scrum, or Kanban.
You can add and update relevant work items, manage product backlog, use sprint backlogs to plan sprints, and use Kanban boards to visualize the workflow and update statuses.
4: Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD): Developers employ the practice of CI/CD, and Azure DevOps supports them.
By using Azure pipelines, developers can automate many of the design processes, including defining builds and their steps, creating test instructions, and manage simultaneous releases.
5. Support for Manual and Exploratory Testing: Azure DevOps’ test features facilitate continuous testing, workflow customization, traceability, criteria-based selection.
6. Integrated Collaboration Services: The feature that enables teams to collaborate across with the entire collection of Azure DevOps features and functions:
- Team dashboards
- Project wiki
- Discussion within work item forms
- Linking work items, commits, pull requests, and other artifacts that support traceability
- Alerts and change notifications managed per user, team, project, or organization
- The ability to request and manage feedback
- Analytics service, analytic views, and Power BI reporting
- Azure Cloud-hosted Services
Azure provides DevOps teams with cloud-hosted services that support application development and deployment. These services can be used by themselves or in combination with Azure DevOps.
For AWS DevOps Read here