Azure DevOps

Azure DevOpsDevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations, which aims to shorten the systems development life cycle, as well as provide continuous delivery with high software quality. Azure DevOps is a web based solution from Microsoft, which aims to facilitate this by providing functionality for requirements gathering, project management, version control, automated builds, testing and release management.

Azure DevOps comes in two forms, Azure DevOps Server and Azure DevOps Services. Azure DevOps Server is a self hosted option that can be run on an organisation's own hardware, whilst Azure DevOps Services is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, provided by Microsoft. Both options can can integrate with numerous integrated development environments (IDEs), although they are tailored for Visual Studio and Eclipse on all platforms.

Terminology

Artifact

An artifact is a deployable component of an application. Pipelines can deploy artifacts that are produced by a wide range of artifact sources, which are stored in different types of artifact repositories.

CI/CD

Continuous Integration, or CI for short, is the process of automating the building and testing of code when changes are committed through version control.

Continuous Delivery, or CD for short, takes the code from the CI process and automatically produces a deployable artifact.

Commit

A way to record the changes to a repository and add a log message to describe the changes that were made.

Pipeline

Pipelines are used to automate the building and testing of code, as well as making it available to other developers. Pipelines can work with most languages and project types. They combine continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to constantly and consistently test, build, and ship code to any target.

Repo

Repos, or repositories, in Azure, are version control tools for managing code. Version control allows for the tracking of changes in code over time, which facilitates the rolling back of code to a specific point, if necessary, for example, if a problem has been found in code.

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