Azure DevOps Pipeline – Key Notes

Azure Pipelines are developed and maintained by Microsoft and is a part of Azure DevOps that automatically builds, tests, and deploys code projects. Azure Pipelines is a great tool to automate almost everything and adopting the CI/CD methodology to run the IT infrastructure in more automated way, It combines continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery to build, test, and deliver your code to any destination. Azure Pipelines supports all major languages and project types.

Here I am going to list important terminology and keynotes on Azure DevOps Pipeline.

Repo and Branches –

A Repository is a set of Directories and files those belongs to a project which is cloned to your local laptop/computer.

A Branch is a version of your development code in your repository. There can be multiple versions of a repository.

There are 2 pipelines in AZDO –

1. Build Pipeline
2. Release Pipeline

Build Pipeline : is used to arrange and build the code for the deployment. This pipeline clone the code form the repository and build the project based on the list of commands and instructions we provide in YAML files.

Release Pipeline: is used to deploy the build artifacts in to the target machines as per your environments like dev, sandbox, UAT and Production environments.

Code can be stored in Azure Repos as well or you can connect to Github or any other repo that is in use in your organization.

You have to authorize the github to connect to Azure Devops repo.

High Level Steps –

1. connect to version control repository [github or azure repo, svn etc]
2. Select the repository your code for your project is available
3. Provide to do definition by means of YAML File.

Pipeline overview –

Create a Project –

Build it and create artifacts

Azure build the project by cloning the repo and creates are war/jar files, called as Artifacts and will be further deployed.

In Summary –

Once we push the code, Artifact will be generated by building the build syntax and pushed to DT servers.

Starting the Pipeline –

1. build pipeline – artifacts can be created with mvn, we can define same commands with code location and other dependencies, these instructions are provided in YML file. [for java we use maven, java scripts project we use node or for dot net it will be different]
2. next we will create YAML file.
3. Select the reposotory where you want to build the project.

4. start with setup build –

5.

I selected Starter Pipeline to start from scratch –

Show Assistant on the right side gives many options like –

I will select Ansible, since I will be connecting to Linux/Windows servers using Ansible –