Azure on 2019 Software Development Trends
Earlier this week I was reading TechRepublic's study article on The 4 Software Development Trends that Will Dominate 2019, and I wanted to test my own knowledge of Azure and it's offerings, within this context. They say that there is no better way to learn than to try and explain your learnings to others and improve yourself in the process each time! I am not a subject matter expert by any means and welcome comments, feedback and discussion on things I missed, as I will have :).
Based on the survey conducted by Atlassian, developers are comfortable and only increasing their adoption of microservices architecture. To help navigate options in Azure that supports this trend, check out this paper: https://aka.ms/K8Spaper
Developers who are evaluating options, generally have the following common questions based on their workload and organizational requirements:
If you happen to be in the midst of microservices adoption, here are some handy resources:
Secondly, more automated testing is expected and fits in well with continuous integration and continuous delivery requirements. You can run non-scheduled or automated test plans using Azure Test Plans (a service within Azure DevOps Services), with Azure Pipelines for generating automated builds containing the test binaries. Azure pipelines provides unlimited minutes and 10 free parallel jobs for open source projects, or 1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes per month for self-hosted CI/CD. Automate testing via workflows with native container support in Azure Pipelines - continuing with the theme of microservices adoption. Automation for build/test/deployment for mobile projects is available via GitHub and Visual Studio App Center tooling.
If your preference is Jenkins with/without parts of Azure DevOps Services to do testing automation, check out our docs and the hands-on lab to get started. In general, Azure and Azure DevOps Services integrate very well across many Open Source tools of choice.
With renewed focus from developers on their users/customer satisfaction and quality of code, the third trend for 2019 is feature flagging for making testing easier. Check out this information read, Explore how to progressively expose your features in production for some or all users, to understand considerations, the what of feature flags and tips on evaluating solutions.
And finally, with developers utilizing microservices architecture, smarter and easier testing automation, they are culturally shifting to release quality vs release speed. At Microsoft, some of these shifts are happening by our 1 Engineering Systems organization and practices of inner-sourcing. To learn about Microsoft's 1ES org and developer culture, see here or check out the video:
Please share your thoughts on how your own organization may align to these four trends.