You’re ready to take your skills to the next level in 2024, and what better way to do that than with Azure DevOps? This powerful set of services and tools can skyrocket your career-if you know how to use them right. Stick with me, and I’ll walk you through everything you need to get started with Azure DevOps this year. We’ll cover the basics, like boards, pipelines, repos, and more. I’ll share tips to help you stand out, as well as mistakes to avoid. You’ll learn real-world examples and practical steps to start leveraging Azure DevOps on your projects. Whether you’re new to DevOps or looking to improve, this guide will help you master Azure DevOps and become an Azure hero in 2024. Let’s level up!
Introduction to Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s cloud service for collaborating on code development and deploying software. It provides developer services to support teams to plan work, collaborate on code development, and build and deploy applications.
Manage your code
Azure DevOps provides Git repositories to store your source code, allowing teams to collaborate on code. You get free unlimited private Git repos to store any code for your projects.
Build and release pipelines!
Set up build and release pipelines to automatically build, test, and deploy your apps. Build pipelines compile your source code and run tests, while release pipelines deploy your app to environments like development, staging, and production.
Agile tools
Use Azure Boards to plan, track, and discuss work across your teams. Create Kanban boards, backlogs, sprint boards, and queries to visualize your work. Stay on top of priorities, assign work, and update statuses to keep your team in sync.
Continuous integration
Set up continuous integration with Azure Pipelines to automatically build and test code after every commit. This helps catch issues early and ensures quality. Every time you push an update, Azure DevOps will build your app, run tests, and validate the changes before deploying to production.
Reports and dashboards
Gain insight into your development projects with interactive reports and dashboards. View summaries of work tracking, builds, releases, tests, and code. Create custom queries and charts to monitor key metrics for your teams.
With a robust set of features for planning, coding, building, testing, and deploying apps, Azure DevOps has everything you need to level up your skills and build better software. Ready to get started? Sign up for free and kick off your first project today!
Key Azure DevOps Concepts: CI/CD, AKS, IAM Roles
To level up your Azure DevOps skills, you need to understand some key concepts. Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) CI/CD is the process of automating your software delivery pipeline. When you make changes to your code, Cl automatically builds and tests it. If it passes, the CD can automatically deploy it to your environment. This speeds up your development cycle and reduces errors.
Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)
AKS lets you easily deploy a managed Kubernetes cluster in Azure. Kubernetes is an open- source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications. Using AKS, you can focus on your apps rather than infrastructure.
Top 5 Benefits of Using Azure DevOps
Enhanced Collaboration
Azure DevOps allows cross-functional teams to work together seamlessly. Developers, testers, designers, and project managers can collaborate on projects in real-time. Using Azure DevOps, you can easily track project schedules, share documents, view each other’s work items, and get updates on the project’s progress. This enhanced collaboration significantly improves productivity and accelerates product delivery.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
Azure DevOps provides built-in CI/CD pipelines to automate your build, test, and deployment processes. You can set up pipelines to automatically build and test code after every commit. This allows you to detect bugs and issues early on. You can also configure deployment pipelines to automatically deploy your app after it passes all tests. This speeds up product delivery and ensures high quality.
Agile Project Management
Azure DevOps has a full set of Agile tools to help you implement Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban methodologies. You can create interactive backlogs, boards, and burndown charts to plan, organize, and track your work. Teams can break down features into user stories, prioritize them, assign them to sprints, and track their progress. This gives you end-to-end visibility into your projects and helps ensure work is delivered on schedule.
Built-in Version Control
Azure DevOps includes Git repositories for managing your source code. Developers can commit, branch, merge, and push code in a centralized location. This makes it easy to track changes, revert to previous versions, and collaborate with teammates. Git also Integrates with Azure DevOps build and release pipelines to deploy the latest code changes automatically.
Reporting and Analytics
Azure DevOps provides over 100 built-in reports and dashboards to gain insights into your projects. You can view burndown charts, velocity reports, test results, build success rates, and more. Teams can make data-driven decisions by analyzing key metrics and KPIs. The reports also provide visibility to stakeholders and help keep projects on track.
Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Azure DevOps
Create an organization!
The first thing you’ll need to do is create an Azure DevOps organization. This is where you’ll manage all your Azure DevOps projects and teams. Head to dev.azure.com and click “Start free” to create a new organization. Choose a unique name for your organization and the location where you want to store your data.
Add a project!
Within your new organization, you’ll want to create at least one project. A project is where you’ll manage the code, work items, builds, releases, and test plans for your software. Click “New project” and choose a name for your project, select the version control system you want to use (Git is a great option), and choose a process template to get started with. The “Agile” template is a good all-purpose choice.
Set up team members!
No DevOps environment is complete without people! Add members to your organization and specify which projects they have access to. You can create teams to organize members, set permissions, and manage notifications. Adding members is easy- just enter their email address and they’ll receive an invitation to join the organization.
Connect to code!
The next step is connecting a code repository to your project. If you chose Git for version control, you’ll need to push your code to a repository in Azure DevOps, GitHub, or another provider. Then, connect that repository to your Azure DevOps project so you can build, test, and release the code. Azure DevOps has built-in Git repositories, or you can connect to an external repo with the click of a button.
Set up a build pipeline!
A build pipeline compiles your source code into a package that can be deployed. In Azure DevOps, set up a build pipeline that points to your code repository. Choose a template to get started, then customize the build stops. At a minimum, you’ll want to restore dependencies, compile the code, and publish an artifact to use for releasing.
Create a release pipeline!
The final step is setting up a release pipeline to deploy your build artifacts. A release pipeline takes the output of a build and deploys it to an environment like development, testing, or production. Set up release triggers to automatically create a new release when a build completes. Add deployments to your release pipeline for each environment, with the proper approvals and checks in place.
With these basics set up, you’ll be well on your way to managing your entire DevOps workflow in Azure DevOps! Let me know if you have any other questions.
Azure DevOps in 2023 and Beyond – What’s Next?
Continued Growth
Azure DevOps will only continue to grow in popularity and capability over the next year. More and more companies are adopting DevOps practices and Azure DevOps provides a robust, integrated set of tools to enable that. You’ll see constant improvements to the UI, new features added, and tighter integration with other Microsoft products.
Increased Automation
There will be a bigger push towards increased automation in the DevOps process. Things like automated testing, continuous integration and deployment, infrastructure as code, and auto-remediation of issues will become more prominent. This allows for faster development cycles, reduced errors, and less manual intervention needed. Azure DevOps has many of these capabilities built-in already, but they will continue to expand and improve them over time.
Enhanced Security
As the adoption of DevOps grows, security is becoming an increasing concern. Azure DevOps will focus more on baking security into the platform and process. Things like automated security scanning, policy enforcement, and compliance management will be emphasized. Microsoft wants customers to feel that the Azure platform, and all services Including DevOps, meet the highest security standards.
Al and ML integration
Artificial intelligence and machine learning will start to play a bigger role in Azure DevOps. Al can help with test automation, detecting vulnerabilities in code, managing Infrastructure, and more. Microsoft is investing heavily in Al and ML so you can expect these capabilities to start making their way into Azure DevOps, allowing for smarter and more optimized DevOps processes.
The future looks bright for Azure DevOps. Microsoft is committed to constant improvement to help companies achieve a mature DevOps practice. Using Azure DevOps will give you access to the latest tools and technologies to optimize your software development lifecycle. Innovations in automation, security, Al and more will transform how you build and deploy software. Overall, Azure DevOps is poised to remain an industry leader in enabling DevOps.
Conclusion
And there you have it! By starting to get familiar with Azure DevOps now, you’ll be in a great spot for when demand really takes off. The tools are only going to get better too. Stick with it through any early frustrations, join some online communities to connect with fellow learners, and you’ll be on your way to becoming an Azure DevOps expert! Keep learning, stay curious, and you can land that dream DevOps job. The hard work will pay off if you start preparing today. You got this!
Mohammad Saad Ahmad
Assosiate Consultant
