Microsoft Ignite – Day 0 Azure DevOps

Day 0 of Microsoft Ignite, what could go wrong?

I have the pleasure of attending the largest Microsoft event of the Year. The Microsoft Ignite is a gathering of everything that happens under the microsoft umbrella, from Surface books to Azure DevOps.

Today is Sunday and I attended a pre-workshop labelled

Hands-on with GitHub and Azure DevOps: Go fast without breaking things

Preface

I had no hands-on experience with integrating GitHub and Azure DevOps. I have heard a lot of good things about Azure DevOps  so it was about time I get my hands very wet.

First section

The day started with a direct jump to the deep end. We started by configuring Azure Devops to allow access to our GitHub repo by deploying a Azure Devops Pipelines marketplace application in Github.

Second section

Then we immediately created a Devops pipeline that builds and tests a predefined .net application.

Third section

After we had a successful build, we deployed the application to a manually deployed Azure Web App service. The service consisted of 2 SQL databases and 4 Web Apps. Modifying the web config via Azure Web App Configurations was very straight forward and provides lots of flexibility to anybody running .net web services in Azure. We also enabled Continuous Deployment for our release pipelines, so any change we merge to our master branch in GitHub automatically gets deployed to our web servers!

Fourth section

The culmination of the day was to deploy our infrastructure using Azure ARM templates automatically during the CI pipeline to run integration tests and then tear down the deployed environment. This was a bit more tricky and most attendees did not get this far. However I managed to get all the pieces in place and was very close to running end to end tests in my CI pipeline, deploying fresh Azure infrastructure and running the tests and tearing them down followed by a release pipeline deploying my software to production!

To summarize

The learnings from todays session prove that it is very easy to take Azure Devops into use. The built-in pipeline editor is far ahead the AWS Codepipeline offering allowing quick creation of pipelines for all kind of workloads.

The other supportive features of Azure Devops like the Boards provide a lot of additional value to any CI/CD process. Visualizing the status of your pipeline, creating and tracking related work items and simply put having a full view of what is happening is super easy.

I recommend everybody to check out Azure DevOps and how it can help you deliver software faster and with more quality! Easy way to get your companies workloads brought into DevOps is to reach out to Antti Heinonen and get help from all of Solitas’ experienced consultants.