In today’s software world, teams must remain agile and fast to market in order to keep up with the ever-changing technology landscape. This means that you no longer have time for manual processes and fragmented workflows; your team needs a solution that can streamline your DevOps workflow and accelerate your time to market
To meet these growing needs, many companies are turning to Microsoft Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps is a suite of services, applications, and tools that streamlines your DevOps workflow. If you’re considering implementing Azure DevOps in your organisation, this easy guide will walk you through everything you need to know about this cutting-edge technology.
What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is a suite of cloud-based software services, applications, and tools that teams can use to automate their software delivery processes and deliver software faster. It’s an end-to-end solution that enables you to plan, build, test, deploy, and monitor your software from end to end.
DevOps includes a variety of features and tools to make it easy for organisations to build and release applications in the cloud, with automation tools that improve cost efficiency and security, and leverage productivity. Azure DevOps can help you streamline your workflow, accelerate your release cycles, and increase your overall quality and efficiency.
Why use Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is a fully-featured DevOps solution that has everything you need to accelerate your time to market. Whether you’re a large enterprise or a SME, the benefits of using Azure DevOps include:
- Increased productivity: the end-to-end automation in Azure DevOps enables you to build, test, and deploy your software with fewer resources. This means you can scale up or down depending on demand without adding more people to the team.
- Centralised management: Multiple projects can be managed from a central hub so your current and onboarding initiatives are always on track and any adjustments needed to deadlines can be made quickly
- Reduced risk: Azure DevOps automates your entire software delivery process, which means there’s less room for human error and you can reduce risk across your organisation.
- Improved collaboration: Azure DevOps has built-in collaboration tools that allow your team members to work together more efficiently and effectively.
- Improved quality: Azure DevOps has built-in testing and quality assurance tools that allow you to increase the quality of your software and minimise bugs.
- High availability: All paid Azure DevOps services are guaranteed to be available 99.9% of the time, as well as build and deploy operations in paid Azure Test Plans and Pipelines, which consistently runs load tests.
- Faster time to market: Azure DevOps has everything you need to accelerate your time to market, from continuous delivery to automated deployment.
Azure DevOps services
Azure Boards
Azure Boards is a DevOps management hub that enables organisations to track and manage their work, as well as visualise their progress on common objectives. It allows team members to see what they’re working on, who they’re collaborating with, and where they’re encountering difficulties in order to help them stay productive.
Azure Pipeline
Azure Pipeline simplifies application development, testing, and deployment by connecting to a range of different tools. With Pipeline’s visual designer, you can set up workflows and trigger actions when they occur. Because of this, you can manage large-scale projects and track progress across teams easily.
Pipeline provides comprehensive logging, error tracking, and notification capabilities to keep track of every phase of the development process. These ensure that no mistakes are made and that every line of code is extensively tested before being released to the public.
Azure Repos
Azure Repos is a source code repository that you can use to manage your code, artefacts, and dependencies. It provides source code management, simplifies collaboration, and integrates with other DevOps tools through extensions.
Using Repos, you can work more efficiently by creating branches and working on multiple code paths simultaneously. You can store a variety of files in one repository and set up automated workflows to track changes and manage permissions.
Azure Test
Azure test is an automated testing service that you can use to manage your code quality and perform any unit, integration, and functional testing. Using Azure Test, you can plan, execute and manage testing processes, and access reports on how effective the test is and follow up on any issues found during the testing process.
Azure Artifacts
A package management service that you can use to share code and dependencies between private and public sources, Azure Artifacts gets around the challenge for developers to create packages that are meaningful to those outside their own company.
Azure Artifacts allows developers to create a trustworthy package containing their code which can be used by other people across teams. It also offers the ability to utilise other people’s packages without having to learn how to code or build an application.
Making the most of your Azure DevOps implementation
Azure DevOps has everything you need to accelerate the software delivery process and improve your overall software quality. Whether you’re a large enterprise or a SME, Azure DevOps has a solution for you. If you’re ready to accelerate your time to market, increase your overall software quality, and automate your entire software delivery process, talk to the Azure specialists at INTELLIWORX and make the most of Azure DevOps for your business.
