Using Azure DevOps to Handle Business Solutions

The modern world is growing at an exponential rate with new and updated applications hitting the market on a daily basis. The frequency of code deployment has changed from once in six months to numerous deployments in an hour. In a time of such fierce competition, it is essential for businesses to provide high-quality and efficient services to their users.  

However, the orthodox development and operations cycles form a huge barrier in rolling out services and updates quickly. To overcome the problem of delay in time to market and reduce the chances of failure, a new working principle which is known as DevOps came into being. 

What is DevOps? 

For beginners, as the name suggests, DevOps is a set of processes that bring together the development and management of IT services or applications. DevOps processes encourage cross-team collaborations to plan, track, develop, build, test, deliver, and monitor the operations of services or applications. The process aims to shorten the development life cycle, increase deployment frequency, and release reliable products and services that exceed user expectations and bolster businesses.  

Azure DevOps:  An Integrated Tool that Brings DevOps to Life 

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps packs a set of cloud-hosted services under one platform and allows users to exploit the advantages of cloud-based development. The services offered under Azure DevOps are: 

Azure Pipelines 

The Azure Pipelines offer continuous development and integration over the cloud. There is no boundary on the language used. Further, the code can be pulled from and committed to any popular source-control systems. In addition to these, integration of Azure Pipelines with Visual Studio App Center allows for deploying mobile applications. 

Azure Boards 

Azure Boards help enterprises track and manage work through Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting. The boards allow for tracking of work across teams and departments. 

Azure Artifacts 

Azure Artifacts help manage dependencies that exist in the project. The artifacts feature of Azure DevOps ensures immutability and performance of the project. Apart from Maven, NuGet, and NPM packages, users also use Universal Packages to store any file or set of files. 

Azure Repos 

Azure Repos provides access to unlimited, cloud-based git repositories and allows developers to pull the code, manage files, and search code. 

Azure Test Plans 

The Azure Test Plans service provides with user access to a manual and exploratory testing toolkit. 

Why is Azure DevOps Essential? 

Many businesses still do ot leverage the benefits a cloud-based development and IT management model. Most businesses still develop their code on different individual machines, commit them one by one and test the whole project. Not only this increases the time to market,but it also creates problems in identifying the bugs in the project.  

Here is how Azure DevOps comes to your rescue: 

Continuous Integration 

Using tools such as Visual Studio Team, services or Jenkins, businesses can build applications in the cloud. Each code commit is first made to a separate branch created for development. After the commit, the code is compiled and built for errors. The committed code is then added to the main branch if it has no errors. The procedure enables easy bug detection and helps accelerate development speed and improve the quality of the application or service. 

Continuous Delivery 

Due to the existence of a production environment on the cloud, enterprises can continuously test for newly added integrations in the production environment which provides organizations the confidence to continuously roll out tried and tested functionalities with ease. 

Automation 

The automation platform reduces the infrastructure’s complexity and machine to machine interaction to a simplified automated procedure. This way of automating the deployment is safer as it involves liberal usage of security, compliance and other tests. The production environment is automatically in safer hands as any errors or bugs are cleared out before production deployment. 

The otherwise time-consuming procurement/allocation of cloud resources is also automated eliminating the need to wait for the entire production infrastructure to be setup up manually. 

Profitability and Growth 

Organizations that employ DevOps in their digital infrastructure are less likely to face the classic problems involving:  

• Scaling infrastructure. 
• Long running Deployment jobs are spanning multiple iterations. 
• Loss of time and developer’s effort in sorting out changes in the environment. 
• Responsibility is not align to common goals or outcomes.  

The comfort of not worrying about any of the above problems and many more budding ones enable organizations to achieve their goals faster and with less effort. 

Reliability 

Increased reliability with products is achieved with intensive testing, pre-production environments identical to actual production setups. 

Agility 

The environment behaves as a well-connected system of nodes thereby giving developer teams a greater sense of control. DevOps decreases the time to deployment drastically, and it is even more pronounced over multiple iterations or product releases. 

DevOps Projects Addition to Azure 

DevOps projects let you map out your DevOps activities like any other mainstream code application. Its main objective is to provide CI, CD, Version Control and Agile tools. It uses:  

• Visual Studio Team Services 
• Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server 
• Git 

Along with the above two tools, you get a Git managed setup which is by default directly deployed to Azure (CD). The Azure DevOps Projects also handles the monitoring of the application after it is deployed. 

Deployment Platforms 

Azure DevOps Platform has three modes of deployment for applications:- 

• Inside Windows Server or Linux virtual machine in Azure Cloud. 
• A Java, Python, Node.js, PHP application or a static website. 
• As containers inside Azure container instances. 

The Azure DevOps ecosystem as you may recognize from above is encompassing towards its acceptance of the platforms used. It has 100+ services that cater to kubernetes, docker, custom OS, custom networking and monitoring of deployed applications.  

This has everything you will need to produce, deliver and maintain quality and powerful applications for your organization and its customers. 

TrnDigital can partner with you to achieve your goals with Azure DevOps 

While the world is moving towards cloud, fully migrated, CI/CD leveraging applications and services reside only with new implementations or large organizations. 

With our team of full stack consultants at  TrnDigial and having deployed scores of application configurations with wildly varying levels of complexity, our collective experience can help you and your team in achieving a fully automated Azure DevOps solution.