DevOps
DevOps brings together people, processes, and technology by automating software delivery to provide continuous value to your users. With Azure DevOps, you can create build and release pipelines that provide continuous integration, delivery, and deployment for your applications. You can integrate repositories and application tests, perform application monitoring, and work with build artifacts. You can also work with and backlog items for tracking, automate infrastructure deployment, and integrate a range of third-party tools and services such as Jenkins and Chef. All of these functions and many more are closely integrated with Azure to allow for consistent, repeatable deployments for your applications to provide streamlined build and release processes.
Service name | Description |
Azure DevOps | Use development collaboration tools such as high-performance pipelines, free private Git repositories, configurable Kanban boards, and extensive automated and cloud-based load testing. Formerly known as Visual Studio Team Services. |
Azure DevTest Labs | Quickly create on-demand Windows and Linux environments to test or demo applications directly from deployment pipelines. |
Azure DevOps Services
Azure DevOps Services is a suite of services that address every stage of the software development lifecycle.
Azure Repos is a centralized source-code repository where software development, DevOps engineering, and documentation professionals can publish their code for review and collaboration.
Azure Boards is an agile project management suite that includes Kanban boards, reporting, and tracking ideas and work from high-level epics to work items and issues.
Azure Pipelines is a CI/CD pipeline automation tool.
Azure Artifacts is a repository for hosting artifacts, such as compiled source code, which can be fed into testing or deployment pipeline steps.
Azure Test Plans is an automated test tool that can be used in a CI/CD pipeline to ensure quality before a software release.
Azure DevOps is a mature tool with a large feature set that began as on-premises server software and evolved into a software as a service (SaaS) offering from Microsoft.
GitHub and GitHub Actions
GitHub is arguably the world's most popular code repository for open-source software. Git is a decentralized source-code management tool, and GitHub is a hosted version of Git that serves as the primary remote. GitHub builds on top of Git to provide related services for coordinating work, reporting and discussing issues, providing documentation, and more. It offers the following functionality:
It's a shared source-code repository, including tools that enable developers to perform code reviews by adding comments and questions in a web view of the source code before it can be merged into the main code base.
It facilitates project management, including Kanban boards.
It supports issue reporting, discussion, and tracking.
It features CI/CD pipeline automation tooling.
It includes a wiki for collaborative documentation.
It can be run from the cloud or on-premises
Most relevant for this module, GitHub Actions enables workflow automation with triggers for many lifecycle events. One such example would be automating a CI/CD toolchain.
A toolchain is a combination of software tools that aid in the delivery, development, and management of software applications throughout a system's development lifecycle. The output of one tool in the toolchain is the input of the next tool in the toolchain. Typical tool functions range from performing automated dependency updates to building and configuring the software, delivering the build artifacts to various locations, testing, and so on.
GitHub vs Azure DevOps
With such similarity between many GitHub and Azure DevOps features, you might wonder which product to choose for your organization. Unfortunately, the answer might not be straightforward.
Although both Azure DevOps and GitHub allow public and private code repositories, GitHub has a long history with public repositories and is trusted by tens of thousands of open-source project owners. GitHub is a lighter-weight tool than Azure DevOps, with a focus on individual developers contributing to the open-source code. Azure DevOps, on the other hand, is more focused on enterprise development, with heavier project-management and planning tools, and finer-grained access control.
Azure DevTest Labs
Azure DevTest Labs provides an automated means of managing the process of building, setting up, and tearing down virtual machines (VMs) that contain builds of your software projects.
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