Page 46 - MSDN Magazine, May 2018

VISUAL STUDIO TEAM SERVICES
Any Language, Any
Platform with Azure
DevOps Projects
Willy-Peter Schaub and Alex Mullans
Over the past two years, Microsoft has rolled out an ambitious continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline initiative for its DevOps platform. The ALM | DevOps Rangers team has been active in the effort, covering the creation of and learnings from each release, both in numerous blog posts and inMSDNMagazinearticlessuchas“ApplyingDevOpstoaSoft- ware Development Project” (msdn.com/magazine/mt767695) and “The Road to Continuous Delivery with Visual Studio Team Services” (msdn.com/magazine/mt814804). Years of investment are paying divi- dends, as Microsoft today boasts a fast-paced and heterogeneous DevOps ecosystem built around a Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) platform that has evolved by leaps and bounds.
Behind this effort are development teams that demand built-in support for popular application frameworks, automatic and seamless CI/CD pipeline integration, and built-in monitoring support—all in the language and platform of their choice. In addition, developers
want to build any application, on any Azure service, in minutes. Speed and simplicity are paramount.
Microsoft Azure DevOps Projects (bit.ly/2E5zkWG) addresses all these needs. It enables developers to launch an app on any Azure App Service in just a few quick steps, providing everything needed todevelop,deployandmonitoranapp.CreateaDevOpsProject, and it provisions all the Azure resources and provides a Git code repository, Application Insights integration and a continuous delivery pipeline setup for deployment to Azure. The DevOps Project dashboard lets you monitor code commits, builds and deployments from a single view in the Azure portal.
This article explores how DevOps Projects enable cloud-powered CI/CD using VSTS to:
• Get up and running with a new application and a full DevOps pipeline in just a few minutes
• Support a wide range of popular frameworks such as .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js and Python
• Integrate with built-in Application Insights for instant analytics and actionable insights
• Start fresh or bring an existing application over from GitHub Alternatively, we could look at the DevOps Project as a feature to help users “get started” on Azure. Imagine a developer who needs to develop and deploy a Node.js solution to Azure. The user needs to find which Azure service works best for the language, framework and platform scenario, prototype the environment, and finally cre- ate an engineering process for the team. Each step has a learning
This article discusses:
• Creation of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline
• Explores the Azure and VSTS magic (power) behind the scenes
• How to tweak and enhance the CI/CD pipeline
Technologies discussed:
Visual Studio Team Services, Azure DevOps, Package Management
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