DevOps Azure

DevOps transformation is quite a demanding service nowadays. DevOps services allow increasing of efficiency of the whole software development process.

In general, DevOps can reduce costs, increase team cohesiveness and competitiveness in the market. Why is this possible? DevOps provides a few main principles. The most part of them is based on continuous processes like continuous integration, delivery, logging and monitoring.

It is possible because of changing the approach to development. The developer should write code in small batches that can be easily tested and added to the main part of code. Also, the developer makes preliminary tests before the QA engineer. Such a process significantly saves time for both specialists. You might ask, how the developer makes tests independently if he needs a testing environment. It is possible because of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – the technology that allows making a custom testing environment by changing parameters in a special textual file called manifest. Manifest is made by DevOps engineer with Terraform, Kuberbetes or other tools.

These changes in the software development cycle make the releases more frequent and the quality of work and applications better.

There are a lot of tools that make such DevOps transformation possible and one of them is DevOps Azure. Azure is a Microsoft product. Microsoft Azure, in general, is the cloud platform that provides different services. A few years ago they have started providing the DevOps services. So, below we will see what it includes and how we can use it for our DevOps transformation.

What is DevOps Azure?

DevOps Azure is a set of DevOps services in the self-titled cloud platform. It can be very convenient if your business processes fully or partially are based on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. In other cases, you might face the complicated processes of migration between different cloud platforms and further DevOps transformation.

DevOps Azure includes next services that you can add to your project:

1. Azure Pipelines. This is a service that allows making Continuous Integration and Deployment/Delivery – CI/CD pipeline. It is one of the essential ideas of the DevOps approach. Azure Pipelines provide a connection to GitHub and any Git repository. In can work with different tools like Kubernetes and support the most popular OS – macOS, Linux and Windows.
2. Azure Boards. These are tools for workload control. It includes Kanban boards, command pannels, multiple reports, etc.
3. Azure Artifacts. This is Maven, npm, and NuGet package channels from public and private sources.
4. Azure Repos. This tool allows using private and public repositories, joint requests, managing files and more.
5. Azure Test Plans. The tool for random and manual testing.

All these services can be customized and scalable, that’s why it can be useful for your company despite the size and direction.

Final thoughts about DevOps Azure

There are a lot of services for cloud migration and DevOps transformation. Sometimes it is hard to choose a suitable one. If you already use Microsoft Azure, the DevOps Azure will be the best choice for you. If you use another cloud platform it can be better to use different DevOps services.

If you can’t choose services for the DevOps transformation you might refer to the Manages Service Provider (MSP). Such companies have wide experience with different projects, so they can provide you the best DevOps services for your business and implement the best practices in this field.

In general, DevOps transformation is a great turn for your business, which will increase the competitiveness and make internal processes better.