Azure DevOps by Microsoft Azure is one of the leading tools that automate CI/CD’s process and, in turn, supports automatic builds and code projects to make them available to others. The Azure pipelines combine Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) to consistently test and build the code and ship it to the target environment.
What is a CI/CD Pipeline?
A CI/CD pipeline is used to automate the process of continuous integration and continuous deployment. The pipeline facilitates the software delivery process via stages like Build, Test, Merge, and Deploy.
In simple words, a pipeline may sound like an overhead, but it isn’t. Instead, it’s a runnable specification of steps that reduce developers’ manual work by delivering a new version of a software productively and saves time.
- Stages of a CI/CD Pipeline:
- Source Stage
- Build Stage
- Test Stage
- Deploy Stage
What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is a collection of services given by Microsoft Azure. It provides development services for a team to support, plan, collaborate, build, and deploy applications. It provides integrated features in a browser or an IDE(Integrated Development Environment). Some of the services for developers are :
- Azure Repos
- Azure Pipelines
- Azure Boards
- Azure Test Plans
- Azure Artifacts
What is Azure Pipelines?
The Azure CI/CD pipeline simplifies continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) in the application development process. You can start from the source stage with existing code on GitHub or on-premise containers. The Azure Repos can maintain a central repository, and the Azure pipelines maintain build and release pipelines for the given project. The Azure DevOps CI/CD process is a crucial process with all the required dev services.
Build Pipeline
- Click on the Build Pipelines on the Azure Dashboard
- Click on the New Pipeline – to create a new build pipeline
- Select your repository
- You can use Classic editor or YAML pipelines
- Now add the Agent job and save the pipeline to build your project
- If you are using maven project select the maven task and add to the agent job and complete the setup
- And publish the artifact as a drop
- Now click on the Run Pipeline
- After execution the summary looks like below
Release Pipeline
- Select Releases under the Pipelines section from the left side
- The release pipeline manages the deployments in Azure DevOps. Click on Edit to examine the pipeline
- Below the release pipeline’s name, you will find the same tabs as in the build pipeline
- Under the Pipeline tab, go to the Artifacts, and select Drop. The build pipeline we examined before is the output to the Artifact
- The release pipeline has an enabled Continuous deployment trigger. This executes a deployment every time a new build takes place. You can also disable the trigger, where the deployments will require manual execution
- Select the dev stage and then click on the Tasks tab at the top. The tasks define all the activities your deployment performs. Like you can see in the below figure
- On the left pane, you will find Releases under Pipelines. This shows the history of releases
- Select the release number to view the release summary. There are menus to explore, like associated work items, release summary, and tests
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