Rules to Better DevOps using Azure DevOps (Pipelines)

The goal of DevOps is to improve collaboration and communication between software development and IT operations teams, in order to deliver high-quality software products quickly and efficiently.

DevOps aims to automate the software development and delivery process, by implementing practices such as continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. This helps to reduce the time it takes to develop and release software, while also improving the quality and reliability of the final product.

Before you begin your journey into DevOps, you should assess yourself and see where your project is at and where you can improve.

Once you’ve identified the manual processes in Stage 1, you can start looking at automation. The two best tools for build and release automation are Github and Azure DevOps.

Now that your team is spending less time deploying the application, you’ve got more time to improve other aspects of the application, but first you need to know what to improve.

Here are a few easy things to gather metrics on:

Now that you’ve got the numbers, you can then make decisions on what needs improvement and go through the DevOps cycle again.

Here are some examples:

Managing secrets is hard. It's not just about storing them securely, but also ensuring that the right people and systems have access to them in a controlled manner, with an auditable trail, while minimizing friction for the processes that legitimately need them, like DevOps pipelines. You wouldn't leave your front door key under the mat, but at the same time you don't want it to take 7 minutes and approval from 4 people to unlock your front door.

If you are using Azure DevOps, there's an awesome Hosted Build Server option you can use to perform your builds with little to no setup. But if you're working on a project that has continuous integration and a long build time, it's not long before those build minutes start to add up.