Getting up to speed with Azure DevOps, Part 2: Azure Pipelines

As a trainer of Azure technologies, I've spent a considerable amount of time teaching Azure Boards and Azure Pipelines to technicians using Azure DevOps. In my previous article, I discussed the capabilities of Azure Boards. Now, let's take a closer look at Azure Pipelines.

One aspect that I particularly like about Azure DevOps is its seamless integration with other Microsoft products, particularly when using Pipelines. You can link your repos that contain all your source code, just like GitHub. You can check out branches, work on a problem, and then check a branch back into the master branch. You can create a pipeline to build the code, get all the modules with the latest work, and put it into a single executable. Once you authorize it to release, it pushes the code out to your test, dev, or production environment in the way you defined. You can push code into your master branch, set up a pipeline to pull in all the modules, and then release it to production.

Pipelines integrate seamlessly with other Azure services and resources. You can set up your Azure subscription in the server settings, and push to Azure, AWS, or any other environment. All of this can be automated. You can build software and set it up to automatically trigger a release, pushing it to production, test, or dev. You can automate testing, too, sending it out to your test plan, and if all tests pass, you can automate the release to production.