How Azure DevOps Speeds Up Innovation and Software Delivery?

DevOps has certainly become the need of the hour as organizations constantly stress on speedy software releases to meet the market needs. On the other hand, cloud computing is another buzzword that has taken the IT industry by storm. We see more and more organizations laying emphasis on using the cloud for their orchestration needs. With both the domains gaining popularity it was not long before people would think to combine the approaches for added benefits. In this blog we will explore how Azure DevOps an amalgamation of Azure Cloud Platform with DevOps practices can boost productivity and software delivery.

This blog will focus on the following pointers:

●??????What are DevOps and Cloud?

●??????What is Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD)?

●??????How CI/CD and DevOps transformed software delivery?

●??????How do Cloud and DevOps go hand in hand?

●??????Azure DevOps Services

●??????How to prepare for becoming Azure Certified DevOps Engineer

?Let us get started with this Azure DevOps blog.

What are DevOps and Cloud?

DevOps is a methodology that focuses on speeding up Software delivery with the adoption of continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) on the back of bringing the operations and developers teams together.

Cloud computing on the other hand aims at orchestrating software infrastructures for organizations, so they get away from trivial and mundane practices of setting up software environments and focus more on the business side of things.

One such popular cloud Service provider is Microsoft Azure. Being a Microsoft Product, it offers easy integration with a wide suite of other Microsoft products, making it a highly versatile service provider.

What is Continuous Delivery (CD) and Deployment (CD)?

Another important term with respect to DevOps is Continuous Integration and Deployment. Simply put, Continuous Integration is the process of merging code changes frequently with the help of automation tools. This code is then verified into the build. Modern software is complicated and composed of multiple programming languages, platforms or cloud service providers and a lot more. Hence, Continuous Integration can help bring small or different chunks of code together.

With different chunks of code coming together, it is important to ensure the code works when integrated.?CI/CD ecosystems will always have a test automation stage. A set of automated tests in an appropriate test environment helps detect serious bugs at an early stage of software delivery.

Continuous Delivery follows Continuous Integration. It ensures that software is always ready for deployment. It is a stage between Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment. If your automation tests run successfully and the code is functioning as intended, then necessary code chunks are linked for further testing or made deployment ready. In other words, Continuous Delivery (CD) is when a company does a software release after quality checks into production without fanfare.

CD also stands for Continuous Deployment. It is an automated and constant deployment of software for every small change made. It focuses on putting all the changes into production. If the ideal situation was to be considered, then the code is constantly evolving, with automated tests ensuring high quality, and the users getting new features consistently.

How CI/CD and DevOps affect Software Productivity?

We have established how CI/CD and DevOps simplify the modern software development requirements, let us now see how these affect Software Productivity.

Saves Times

With complex codes, developers often struggle to determine the right configurations to work on. With CI/CD, developers work on smaller chunks of code, hence reducing development complexity. This in turn increases the software development speed.

Automation is another aspect of CI/CD and DevOps that helps automate numerous steps in the process. When these practices are put in place, it ensures developers work less on redundant tasks, which in turn helps save time.?This not only saves time but also money, thus making your code more functional.

Offers Flexibility

CI/CD and DevOps practices provide quick feedback cycles. These feedback cycles ensure you can spot errors quickly and deal with them at the earliest. Since the code can be broken down into smaller chunks, reviewing any piece of the code is possible with the use of shorter loops. This helps address bugs when they are small and prevent the issue from getting more complex.

Shorter loops let developers understand what works and what does not and hence let them adapt accordingly. Shorter loops ensure faster integration and more productivity in return.

Upgraded MTTR

The acronym stands for Mean Time To Resolution which helps measure the reliability and maintainability of repairable features. For any broken feature, it sets an average time for repair. Since the fix is tested in no time, CI/CD pipelines can help recover faster from most setbacks. Also, with smaller code changes and fault isolations, we can reduce MTTR thus helping increase productivity from a business perspective.

Improvement and Growth

The aim of any software is to give the user a smooth and error-free experience. DevOps and subsequent CI/CD practices are the best solution to improve the quality of your software. The ability to run quality checks throughout the process helps improve the quality of code and ensure that the software works consistently. Automation also ensures avoiding human errors and helps in the improvement and quality of software with less to no errors in most releases.

Easy Maintenance and Growth

A user would wish for a software that has easy maintenance and updates at disposal. DevOps and CI/CD ensures shorter and targeted release cycles. It holds back features that are not ready for release. Most CI/CD pipelines also ensure that maintenance happens during downtime. So, there is no waiting time.

Implementing DevOps in an organization requires concentrated efforts from the leadership and teams. Find out how a culture to support DevOps approach can be developed in an organization. Read our blog.

?How do Cloud and DevOps go hand in hand?

DevOps and Cloud are very important to meet the market’s software requirements but on the surface, it may appear that they have very few things in common. So how can they go hand in hand to work together?

To keep it simple, the cloud helps in setting up an application-specific infrastructure to enable developer teams to have more development conducive options at their disposal. There are added benefits like automation and provisioning through code, which allows administrator teams to have a breather, make fewer operational mistakes and speed productivity with intuitive monitoring and operational solutions.?

Cloud computing with automation and provisioning can help set up processes for DevOps that may require a cultural change at an organizational level. Below are the key benefits of the Cloud DevOps approach:

●??????Faster Time to Market: Faster access to development environments and streamlined developer processes can help in faster software delivery.

●??????Less Complexity: Automation and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) simplifies system maintenance and helps reduce software and cloud complexity.

●??????Increased Security: Automation, right and left security shifts leaves very little room for human error making your orchestration very secure

●??????Reduced Downtime: Stateless applications, autoscaling and data replication are cloud computing’s gift towards minimal downtime.?

Let's move ahead and understand how Microsoft Azure embraces DevOps and what are the popular Azure DevOps Services at our disposal.

Do you want to learn about adopting DevOps practices? Read the blog titled, “Fast-track Innovation with Azure DevOps Training” and find out about DevOps goals, challenges in implementing DevOps, Azure DevOps services and the role of an Azure Certified DevOps Engineer in your organization’s transformation.

Azure DevOps Services

Azure Pipelines

This service simplifies the process of setting pipelines that are supported by the Azure platform. It lets you build, test and deploy applications continuously

Azure Boards

This Azure DevOps service is an interface that tracks tasks, bugs, and features for your software project. It helps track every development stage to keep your team goals aligned with the corresponding code changes.

Azure Artifacts

With this service you can create, host, and share packages with your team. It facilitates fully integrated package management, and can be achieved with mere clicks. There is room to create packages like Maven, npm, and NuGet packages irrespective of project and team size.

Azure Repos

It is Microsoft Azure’s answer to code repository and storage. It offers unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repositories and lets you pull, push and commit your changes to these repositories.

Azure Test Plans

It is a toolkit that supports and facilitates end to end, manual and exploratory testing for your setup to ensure smooth functioning of the software.

This was about the popular Azure DevOps services. Let us now move ahead and take a look at the final bit of this Azure DevOps blog.

How to prepare to become Azure Certified DevOps Engineer?

With DevOps and Cloud being the buzzwords for the right reasons, many people have started aspiring Azure DevOps careers as the related roles offer many opportunities and good pay as per the market standards. Hence it won't be a bad time to consider getting a Microsoft Certification and specifically Azure DevOps certification. Are you too one of those aspirants and wondering where to start? Don’t worry, this bit will chalk out a plan that can help you stride toward your goal.

Plan your certification

First things first, start by exploring what are the Azure certification requirements and then analyze where you stand in your pursuit. Visit the official page to understand what the certification is all about and jot down important pointers on what all needs to be covered. Set a deadline so you can plan your preparation. The image below gives you a glimpse of the Azure DevOps certification path.

What to study?

●??????Start by brushing up on cloud computing and DevOps fundamentals

●??????Create an Azure free tier account and start exploring the services it offers

●??????Azure offers numerous core cloud offerings like computation, storage, monitoring, databases, security, etc. Start learning these, as they will form the basis of exploring DevOps on cloud

●??????Explore the core Azure DevOps services and see how you can align them with your DevOps skills

●??????Developer roles expect you to have programming skills like knowledge about linux fundamentals and control over at least one programming language like Python, Java, etc

●??????Practical knowledge is important hence start executing open source projects. There are plenty available?on the official documentation

●??????Look into dumps and topics discussed on Azure forums and groups

●??????Make use of free resources like YouTube playlists, and even the official documentation.

●??????Finally understand how the Azure Certification tests work. They have fairly intuitive exams and start taking mock tests

Time to invest

Here is a tentative timeline that you can refer to. Please note everybody has a different pace and in your case, you may pick up some stuff quickly or may take longer than the others. The key is to be patient. Here is how you can pace your study,

?●??????Cloud Fundamentals (2-3 Weeks, 1 hr per day)

●??????DevOps Fundamentals (2-3 Weeks, 1 hr per day)

●??????Programming Fundamentals (Subjective to one's learning curve)

●??????Azure Fundamentals and hands-on (8-12 Weeks, 2-3 hrs per day)

●??????Mocks and Projects (3-4 Weeks, 1-2 hrs per day)

In case you are confused and are having trouble structuring your preparation you can have a look at Netcom Learning’s Azure Certified DevOps Engineer Training for a more structured and learning-oriented approach.

There you go we have successfully explored how Azure DevOps can speed up innovation and software delivery.?