Chaminda Chandrasekara - Hands-on Azure Pipelines: Understanding Continuous Integration and Deployment in Azure DevOps

Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/978-1-4842-5901-6 . For more detailed information, please visit http://www.apress.com/source-code .

Demand for automation in the software delivery process has gone from an optional standpoint to a mandatory, essential, and integral requirement. To keep up with Agility in software development teams, there needs to be rapid and consistent software deployment methodology for development and operations teams to work together to ensure successful and fail-safe delivery of a software product to each target environment. It is essential to even provision infrastructure with automated code before deploying a software on a new environment to guarantee that all the required dependencies are set up before deploying software applications.

Azure Pipelines, which is the Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) tool in Azure DevOps, supports building, packaging, and deployment of software projects, developed with any language targeting any platform. It comes with a rich feature set that can be extended with various extensions, developed by Microsoft as well as third-party vendors and also community experts. If one cannot find an extension to do the job with Azure Pipelines, he or she can extend Azure Pipeline capabilities easily, due to its extensibility as well as readily available samples and templates for implementing such extensions.

Hands-on Azure Pipelines will take you through a journey with concepts of CI/CD and Azure Pipeline features and capabilities, while giving you a complete explanation of using each feature to implement the automation of your software project delivery using a consistent and robust approach. The book will highlight the capabilities in Azure Pipelines to build software developed in any platform and language, using Microsoft-hosted Windows, Linux, and MacOS agents, as well as giving you guidance on how to set up your own build environments with all three platforms. You will find hands-on guidance lessons to understand how almost each and every feature works in Azure Pipelines, including the latest YAML-based configuration and pipeline as code examples.

In addition to the exploration of existing features, the book will take you through the steps of extending Azure Pipelines, with additional tasks from the marketplace as well as implementing your own feature extensions, utilizing the Azure DevOps REST API . Hands-on Azure Pipelines will provide you with recommended build and release patterns to implement with Azure Pipelines and give you guidance on setting up artifacts and versioning for your release packages.

We are thankful for all the mentors who have encouraged and helped us during our careers and who have provided us with so many opportunities to gain the maturity and the courage we needed to write this book.

We would also like to thank our friends and colleagues who have helped and encouraged us in so many ways.

Last, but in no way least, we owe a huge debt to our families. Not only because they have put up with late-night typing, research, and our permanent air of distraction, but also because they have had the grace to read what we have written. Our heartfelt gratitude is offered to them for helping us make this dream come true.