CI/CD Pipeline in Azure DevOps

Continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines will improve software’s frequent delivery by adapting Azure DevOps services. A CI/CD pipeline will perform automated monitoring and controlling over the application’s delivery to improve its integration and testing phases. This methodology gives the solution to the development and operations team to integrate the new code without arising any critical bugs.

Azure Pipelines (CI vs CD- The Dissimilarities)

Continuous Integration(CI) is an automated process that allows any code changes in code to an application to be regularly developed, tested, and merged to a shared repository. This is well suited for an app that has multiple branches in development.?

Continuous Delivery(CD) represents the deployment of artifacts into the production environment. This will automatically test the bug and upload it to a repository. Using Continuous Delivery, you can reduce poor visibility error and miscommunication between dev and business teams.?

Create and Configuring CI and CD Pipelines with Azure DevOps using .Net core

Azure CI/CD pipelines finally deliver a high-performing, high-quality product. These pipelines can be defined either from the user interface or by using YAML syntax.

The overall process can be divided into four major parts:

1. Setup source control for a new project
2. Create and Configure CI/CD pipelines to deliver the application in the Azure environment.
3. Configure Release pipeline to deploy same application parallelly in on-premise/Self-Hosted server
4. Run Azure DevOps Pipeline to deploy the application in 2 environments.?

?In the below video, I have clearly explained the complete lifecycle of the CI/CD pipeline for an application. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH5EY7FCFQw

?CI/CD Tools?

CI/CD tools easily automate the development, deployment, and testing processes. There are a variety of CI/CD tools available from different vendors. But you have to select the efficient tools according to your requirements. Here, I have listed out a few tools for your reference.

• One of the most advanced open-source tools is JenKins which is used to handle the tasks from CI server to CD hub.
• Kubernetes platform-based CI/CD pipelines use the Tekton tool which provides cloud-native service with containers.
• If you are looking for a tool that is based on multi-cloud environments, then you can select Spinnaker.
• GoCD, provides an automated process for the entire build-test-release process from source code check-in to deployment environment.

There are some other tools like ConCourse, Screwdriver that also support azure pipelines.

Advantages of CI/CD Pipelines

With Azure CI/CD pipelines, you can experience lots of benefits in multiple target environments. because they are multifactored.

• Version control system - It supports Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). With Azure CI/CD pipelines, we can control source code in GitHub, Bitbucket, Subversion, or any other Git repository.
• Progressive Deployment - While you develop and test the phases, these pipelines allow you to set as many stages as you have to control the project quality. It also gives deliberate delivery of CI/CD solutions to the customer.
• Achieve deployment targets- It allows the applications to deploy?
• Pricing- It is free for public projects. But, if you take this for private projects, you can run up to 1800 minutes of pipeline jobs free per month.