Practical DevOps with Microsoft Azure

This video will give you an overview of the course.

The aim of this video is to discuss different perspectives of software development, from basic software engineering to its tools, patterns, strategies, and frameworks up to the modern software.

• Discuss different models and a little about their implementations and role in the software development lifecycle

• Highlight the features of common SDLCs and then discuss how complexity grows in a traditional software development process

• Get a quick overview of Agile flow and its requirements

Discuss why we need to take a step ahead from Agile to DevOps.

• Discuss the relationship between the developer and operations teams

• Explore how DevOps bridges the gaps and how automation makes the flow smoother by taking maximum control of the ongoing process

• Oversee and talk about the responsibilities that a DevOps team should possess in order to have the real ownership

Potentially, we’ll see what CI/CD is and the misconceptions related to its role in this whole DevOps chain.

• Learn about the base line where Dev and Ops meet and the actual concept behind it

• Discuss the continuous nature of DevOps flow and how much it impacts the overall process

• Address actual outcomes and role functionality of these two major phases (CI/CD), and the code-level benefits of being in the DevOps chain

From start to the end, learn the entire flow that needs to be followed and how this cycle makes the things less frictional.

• Learn about the different phases and the given eases and benefits of each of these phases

• Study the concept of DevOps and SRE engineers

• Get to know what DevOps is for developers and how they should consider playing their role for it

There are many different cloud platforms that support DevOps practices, but you need to choose wisely which one ideally suits your requirements.

• Understand why Microsoft Azure could provide a suitable cloud platform to offer the needed services and tools

• Highlight the different features offered by Microsoft Azure to make the DevOps implementations easy and scalable

• Discuss a few other reliable tools that make Azure a more powerful option, that is, VSTS

What is it about and what does it offer to make things organized and updated within the team?

• It offers a cloud-based solution of Visual Studio team foundation services

• Explore the role of VSTS throughout the course

• Learn how efficiently it works with Azure and provide connectivity to it

The aim of this video is to learn how VSTS works in integration with Azure.

• Learn what VSTS offers as a service: endpoint connectivity, user accounts, Azure AD, and so on

• Discuss Azure AD, the principles that help us to access other resources for the DevOps pipeline, and overall development

• Take a look at how the ‘DevOps Project’ helps a team to commit, build, release, and do analytics using VSTS

Learn what it supports, and how it opens the path to use many other third-party open source tools and services.

• Know how Azure supports the idea of working with open source tools and technologies

• Learn why Microsoft loves open source and became an open source contributor, and where Azure stands in it

Azure DevOps project is not a typical DevOps project. It’s a platform that provides ease to go along with all the steps included in DevOps implementations, but on the other hand, it has some limitations. They need to be considered beforehand.

• Understand what the considerable limitations are when we decide to work with a DevOps project

• Jot down a list of scenarios and questions on which you should consider your needs and requirements

• Discuss the role of Azure DevOps, VSTS, and App Service from different types of actions involved in the DevOps lifecycle

The aim of this video is to discuss multiple considerable things while creating an account.

• Talk about how to make a selection of runtime

• Discuss how to select a VSTS account as per the app’ needs

• Understand the terms to create an Azure App Service

Learn how to access the DevOps dashboard and the features we need to get familiar with.

• Discuss all of the accessible information at a dashboard

• Learn about reporting of the version control system, repository information, and so on shown on the dashboard

• Learn how error messages work in analytics and how we can see the site traffic from the dashboard

The aim of this video is to discuss version control in VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) and how to use it for building and managing our applications.

• Discuss properties like number of allowed repositories, their accessibility, and so on.

• Look into the user account and security settings. Target other topics like REST APIs, GIT commands, and online code editors.

• Highlight some of the possible limitations: storage, import, export options, and supported large filesystem by GIT.

This video is a demonstration of how we can configure the continuous integration pipeline or edit the pipeline that is already created by Microsoft Azure for us.

• Learn how to add tasks and agents in the pool, and create and utilize the variable for our CI pipeline

• Explore how to set triggers and why exactly we need them

• Specify the build artifacts, specify the retentions, and look for the history and summary settings as well

We discuss why exactly we need to test our application and what the right steps to test our application functionality and expected behavior would be.

• Discuss why VSTS keeps testing applications

• Know the tools and scripting languages used by DevOps pipelines

• Learn what would happen in case of failure, to whom the alerts will be sent, and so on

In this video, we walk though some hidden gems of a DevOps project, such as the release environment, staging with best practices, and supported tools by VSTS (FTP, PowerShell, VM deployment, and so on).

• The build pipelines were created and configured the release settings

• Discuss the practical insight of the phases like integration, testing, and deployment

• Discuss Azure support for deployment slots

Learn how we can include more agents (especially the Azure Virtual Machine), the need for it, and how we can improve the performance using these virtual machines.

• Learn what packages and products we can install on these virtual machines, and how we can download the installer for this

• Discuss the benefits of using these agents and the different types of cross-platform agents

• Explore the account settings

There are some necessary settings and configurations to understand in order to get the expected behavior while working with Azure App Service. We’ll go through all the settings in this video.

• Explore environment variables and learn how to set them

• Discuss the privacy and policy settings, and how we can store passwords and connection strings securely

• Get to know how we can set different alerts and render the default pages at times when our site is down

The concept of deployment slots is an advanced topic, provided by Azure for ease while deploying and maintaining our applications over the Azure portal.

• Learn the benefits of having deployment slots

• Know how we get the endpoint in the same service and same subscription for the other instances of our application

• Discuss how we can manage the load without missing the traffic

Create a test environment and also learn about other settings such as instance scaling and API integration.

• Explore how deployment slots can be used as the production environment

• Discuss how your application will behave at times when new changes will be pushed

• Test the working of REST APIs and their requests

This is the concept: our users will not face downtime issues because we have already set and tested the overall functionality after committing the code in the deployment slots directly.

• Learn the deployment slots and how we test overall app functionality

• Discuss how downtime affects user experience when there are updates in the code

• Learn how there will be no downtime and no user request that will be missed on swapping the IPs of production and testing slots

Branches are created in order to keep our main branch clean. Separate branches can have code about which we’re not 100% sure to proceed with. So, the benefit of these branches is maintaining the track and builds separately.

• Create a subbranch and then commit the code in it

• Merge these branches with the master branch if our team decides to proceed with these changes

We’ve talked about CI in the starting sections. Now we’ll see how we can implement it and create the build environment to have the CI applied on it. Which is one of the major go-to steps in the DevOps cycle.

• Decide on either to import the build definition or to create a new one

• Select the template and then add tasks in it

• Set variables and configure other settings so that our build will listen to all the changes onward

We’ve talked about deployment in the starting videos. Now in this video, we will talk about how we set up the release environment and set it up properly.

• Create an empty release environment

• Select either a template for pre-configurations and dependencies, or our custom libraries

• Select artifact to get the build results in order to proceed and start the build

In this video, we learn to commit the code using GIT commands from the command line. We understand different commands and their usage.

• Initialize the repositories and add code

• Commit the changes locally

• Push the changes to remote repository

In this video we’ll analyze our repository after we have committed the code.

• Learn which build has been triggered and who has triggered this build

• Know what changes have occurred in our release environment

• Navigate to the home page with all the latest changes

The aim of this video is to learn how to set alerts.

• Learn to send a notification

• Explore role-based alerts

• Discuss team-bases alerts and how to configure them

For the monitoring and all the insights, such as traffic load, timely requests, success, error codes, and so on, we need to have a monitoring tool. For this purpose, we’ll use Microsoft’s own library, which is Application Insights.

• Download Application Insights using npm and install it

• After installing the package using npm, we’ll import it using ‘require’

• Use Application Insights to report and track all the traffic and happenings on our site

Learn how monitoring works and how you can visualize the stats, requests, and all trends based on different activities and actions.

• Examine the wider view, where we can analyze each request with its return code and status

• Discuss the options using which we can fix issues and errors before our users will encounter them

• Examine the useful stats and properties that we can view from our application dashboard and how these can be useful for us

The aim of this video is to learn how we can fix the code issues and the useful options for patching. These issues will be fixed after analyzing the code properly.

• After analyzing the root cause, optimize and fix the code

• Discuss the possible solutions for the issues found

• Test the performance of the code

Alerts are extremely useful for small as well as large teams. We can configure them to track any type of behavior or event in order to tackle issues and dynamically change tracks, quickly and smartly.

• Learn how we can put different conditions to make rules and define the time and frequency constraints

• Demonstrate how to make alert groups in order to combine multiple alerts and rules

• Set the email notifications for different roles

This video will give you the summary of the course