“Azure DevOps” – A faster, Smarter and Simplified Solution to Automate Software Delivery
In August 2018 nearly 80,000 users and customers of Microsoft used Azure DevOps to deploy high-quality software products with greater efficiency. Azure DevOps services are among the most reliable and complete services intended for the public cloud.
Azure DevOps – What is it?
One of the most interesting Microsoft’s announcements of the year 2018
Azure DevOps is the evolution of VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services). It emphasizes on application and service delivery at a faster pace without compromising on its quality and performance.
It is a mix of Visual Studio Team Services, Team Foundation Server and Azure, all pooled up into ONE, with some improvements and some more additions. Azure DevOps, development of Visual Studio Team Services, offer benefits of research and investment carried out for 15 years to support software developers. DevOps work in close alignment with industry goals. The methodology works exceptionally well in determining the success of collaboration of teams.
Significant offerings by Azure DevOps
With Azure DevOps, we get Azure Boards, Azure Pipelines, Azure Repos, Azure Test Plans and Azure Artifacts
1. Azure Pipelines – A brand new CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) service allowing unhindered build, test, and delivery of the system to any cloud platform. This is the particular class of Azure DevOps service that has cloud-hosted agents, especially for Windows, macOS, and Linux. Moreover, each open source project gets no less than 10 parallel jobs without having to pay a dime, the infrastructure Pipeline service offers an opportunity for high service quality with exceptional performance, irrespective of cloud, platform, and language.
Did you know that several open source projects including CPython, Visual Studio, Tox, Atom, TypeScript, Code, and Pipenx use Azure Pipelines?
2. Azure Artifacts – A universal store for all artifacts that are being used for development and deployment. Their major function is to ensure the performance and immutability of codebase dependencies. The Azure Artifacts offers Credential Provider to automate the credential acquisition for the purpose to restore NuGet packages. The artifacts capability of Azure DevOps is all about “Code-Once-Share-Packages-across”. With the service, experts can host their private and public Maven, npm, and Nuget packages for highly scalable and reliable results.
3. Azure Boards – It ensures successful planning, tracking, and discussion of tasks across teams. Tracking can be done through backlogs, Kanban boards, custom reporting, and team dashboards. To cater to all ideas and visions, Boards can significantly help in concocting tracking of the flexible work item and sprint planning. Undoubtedly, efficient tracking of this combination is viable empowering all ideas. Tracking is possible at all stages of development and keeping the team in close alignment with any changes that are introduced in the code.
Moreover, with Built-in Scrum Azure Boards, your teams will have the ability to conduct stand-ups, planning meetings, and sprints. Another benefit of availing this service is assessing the project status through dashboard widgets and powerful analytics tools.
4. Azure Repos – With Azure Repos from Azure DevOps, users get access to cloud-hosted, private, unlimited Git Repos, code search, and pull requests for their project. It allows secure connection into Git Repos irrespective of any editor, Git client, or IDE.
5. Azure Test Plans – Test Plans from Azure DevOps let the user test and ship using exploratory and a manual testing toolkit with an aim to improve the quality of code being implemented. These Test Plans capture data from scenarios where identification of defects is done to make them actionable. These tests can be performed both on the web and desktop apps with an advantage of end-to-end traceability along with the impeccable quality of features.
Benefits of DevOps with Azure
Some of the notable benefits of Azure DevOps with features such as Git Code Repository, continuous delivery pipeline, and Application Insights Integration includes –
- Easy installation and quick configuration of the app for effortless multitasking.
- Compatible with multiple frameworks and platforms such as Python, Java, .NET, PHP, Node, etc.
- Through built-in applications, instant analysis of application becomes feasible.
- DevOps projects let the user avail the facility of bringing a brand new app from Git or make an app of own.
- Customization of applications and their deployment is possible and effortless
- Adding a test environment for production validity is another advantage of Azure DevOps
- Best quality and flow of code becomes manageable
- Tracking the progress of the project backlog with various applications is one other significant advantage of Azure DevOps project.
RISCO’s Case Study
RISCO’s engagement with Microsoft’s partner
RISCO Group is a leading technology company offering its topnotch cloud-based security solutions, video monitoring, video verifications, and innovative connected home solutions. The organization is an eminent supplier of safety installation products such as intrusion alarm systems for home and commercial market purposes. The company aims at delivering top-of-the-line economical and efficient security installations through SaaS and cloud-based solutions.
RISCO’s deployment process was dealing with –
- Inconsistencies of production environments and QA
- Lack of coordination of Research and Development and IT groups
- Long release cycles
To address the coordination issues, RISCO adopted DevOps practices to support continuous Integration and Delivery. The process became feasible by automating the process of preparing dev/test environments in minutes (which usually takes days or even weeks of manual processing) with one-click. Automation was key to this process and managed to save nearly 200 hours/30 days. Employing the best practices of Azure DevOps paved the way for accomplishing the larger objective. RISCO had used Infrastructure as a code and self-service environments in the process.
At Wildnet…
Azure DevOps presents a list of automation capabilities and benefits empowering software developers and drive the company’s growth and revenue. Wildnet employs a dedicated team of Azure DevOps developers to help deliver projects under expected deadlines. Our experts fully leverage their offerings to create and deploy projects showcasing exceptional performance, efficiency, reliability, and robustness.
To learn more about Azure DevOps or if you are looking to adopt Azure DevOps on your project, Let’s discuss! Just write to us at marketing@wildnettechnologies.com.
