Now, it's time to focus on another revolutionary online service that enables continuous integration, continuous deployment, and continuous delivery seamlessly: Azure DevOps. In fact, it would be more appropriate to call it a suite of services available under a single name. Azure DevOps is a PaaS provided by Microsoft and hosted on the cloud. The same service is available as Team Foundation Services (TFS) on-premise. All examples shown in this book use Azure DevOps.
According to Microsoft, Azure DevOps is a cloud-based collaboration platform that helps teams to share code, track work, and ship software. Azure DevOps is a new name; earlier, it was known as Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). Azure DevOps is an enterprise software-development tool and service that enables organizations to provide automation facilities to their end-to-end application life cycle management process, from planning to deploying applications, and getting real-time feedback from software systems. This increases the maturity and capability of an organization to deliver high-quality software systems to their customers.
Successful software delivery involves efficiently bringing numerous processes and activities together. These include executing and implementing various Agile processes, increasing collaboration among teams, the seamless and automatic transition of artifacts from one phase of the ALM to another phase, and deployments to multiple environments. It's important to track and report on these activities to measure and improve delivery processes. Azure DevOps makes this simple and easy. It provides a whole suite of services that enables the following:
- Collaboration among every team member by providing a single interface for the entire application life cycle management.
- Collaboration among development teams using source-code-management services.
- Collaboration among test teams using test-management services.
- Automatic validation of code and packaging through continuous integration using build-management services.
- Automatic validation of application functionality, deployment, and configuration of multiple environments through continuous deployment and delivery using release-management services.
- Tracking and work-item management using work-management services.
The following screenshot shows all the services available to a project from the Azure DevOps left navigation bar:
An organization in Azure DevOps is a security boundary and logical container that provides all the services that are needed to implement a DevOps strategy. Azure DevOps allows for the creation of multiple projects within a single organization. By default, a repository is created with the creation of a project; however, Azure DevOps allows for the creation of additional repositories within a single project. The relationship between the Azure DevOps Organization, Projects, and Repository is shown in the following diagram:
Azure DevOps provides two types of repositories:
- Git
- Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC)
It also provides the flexibility to choose between the Git or TFVC source-control repository. There can be a combination of TFS and TFVC repositories available within a single project.