Episode 143–Azure Pipelines - a podcast by The 6 Figure Developer

 

In this episode we talk about Azure Pipelines. 
DefinitionsWhat is a pipeline

Chain of repeatable actions/tasks that transform some input into some output. Its like afunction chain.



Types of pipelinesBuild Pipeline

This pipeline takes the source code as input and produces deployable artifacts as the output.It may also do some unit testing, linting and static analysis to the code to check the validatiy of the output artifacts.


Release PiplelineThis pipeline takes the deployable artifacts as input and produces deployed environments as outputs.
It may also perform some automated integration tests to test the validity of the deploymentContinuous Integration (CI)

This is the practice of merging the small batches of developer changes into the main branch continuously instead of all at once at the end of a development cycle.This is facilitated by a good build pipeline.
For good or worse CI Pipeline and Build Pipeline are often conflatedContinuous Delivery (CD)

This is the practice of automatically deploying an artifact to an environment as soon as the artifact is created.This does not mean that the environment production.
This is facilitated by a good release pipelineFor good or worse CD Pipeline and Release Pipeline are often conflated



CI/CDThis is when we combine the practice of Continuous Integration with the practice of Continuous Delivery



Continuous DeploymentThis is the practice of extending the automatic deployment of an artifact through all stages until is automatically deployed to production.
This requires one or more good release pipelines
It often gets confused with Continious Delivery. It is Continuous Delivery but Continuous Delivery is not Continuous Deployment.Azure DevOps Products


Azure DevOpsA suite of development tools


Azure PipelinesTool for building out the build and release pipelines
Alternates Jenkins, Octopus, TeamCity, Circleci, GitLabExcellent GitHub and Azure DevOps Repos integration, but can connect to other remote repositories
Excellent Azure integration, but can deploy into most any platfor or environment.Linux, macOS and Windows adjents
Supports most lanuagesFree for Open Source (10 parallel jobs unlimited minutes)
First agent free for closed sourceBefore Creating a Pipeline


Consider your branching strategyRecommend, Trunk-based Strategy

Team shares single trunk (master) that all development is based off of.Release Flow






Creating a Build PipelineYAML vs Classic

Recommend, YAML uses a yaml config stored in the source code repository to define the build pipeline.Classic is good for learning the platform and can be used to figure out the correct yaml.



triggerRecommend, based on changes to specified branchs

can include or exclude files and folders within the branchcan be triggered on a timed schedule



define jobsa job us run on an agent and has its own variables and copies of source code etc.jobs can be completed in parallel



define steps in jobssteps are the collection of steps/tasks that a given job will run



define the task in stepeach step is a task
this will be the heart of your build pipeline and will depend largely on what you are buildingvariables

you may want to specify some variables across jobs, like version numberpools

you many want to specify the type of agent to use by default instead of in every job definitionCreating a Release Pipeline



ClassicThe “only released” method for creating a release pipeline is the classic method
You could create a yaml build pipeline that performed the release tasks but triggers might be more challenging.Recommend, There are some other options in pre-release.



select artifactsthis will likely come from artifacts published from a build pipeline

Further episodes of The 6 Figure Developer Podcast

Further podcasts by The 6 Figure Developer

Website of The 6 Figure Developer