End-To-End CI/CD Automation Using Azure DevOps

This article is purely for beginners who want to start learning basic Azure DevOps CI/CD, as a part of this we will cover the following,

What is Azure DevOps?
Azure Portal
- Azure Subscription
- Create App Service
Visual Studio
- Create .Net Core Web Application
- Push to Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps Portal
- Create Organization
- Defining service connections
- Create Build Pipeline - Continuous Integration (CI)
- Create Release Pipeline - Continuous Deployment (CD)

What is Azure DevOps?

A set of practices intended to reduce the time between committing a change to a system and the change being placed into normal production, while ensuring high quality.

DevOps is a combination of Development and Operations. It means Dev + Ops = DevOps.

It is a culture which automates systems and improves and accelerates delivery to the client in a repeated manner. It’s basically a collaboration between the Development team and the Operations team for serving up a better-quality application. It is a culture for continuous integration and continuous delivery where we make the automated build system as well as an automated deployment system.

In other words, DevOps is practice collaboration between Development and Operations from the planning of a project to deployment on production. It involves the complete SDLC life cycle as well as monitoring.

Plan => Code => Build => Test (CI)

Release => Deploy => Operate =>Monitor(CD)

In order to understand the DevOps, we should consider the following points as well,

DevOps means only combining the two teams of Development and Operations.
It is not a separate team.
It is not a product or tool.

Components of Azure DevOps

Azure Boards - contains Work Items, Boards, Backlogs, Sprints to support planning and tracking work, code defects, and issues
Azure Repos - provides Git repositories or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC) for source control of code
Azure Artifacts - allows teams to share Maven, npm, and NuGet packages from public and private sources and integrate package sharing into your CI/CD pipelines
Azure Test plans - provides several tools to test apps, including manual/exploratory testing and continuous testing
Azure Pipelines - provides build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery for applications

Azure Portal

The Azure portal is a web-based, unified console that provides an alternative to command-line tools. With the Azure portal, you can manage your Azure subscription using a graphical user interface. You can build, manage, and monitor everything from simple web apps to complex cloud deployments, create custom dashboards for an organized view of resources, and configure accessibility options for the best experience.

Navigate and Login to Azure Portal here.

Azure Subscription

If you don’t have Azure subscription, get the 30 day free trial services from here.

Create App Service

Now create Azure App Service to publish web application.

Go to App Services and click on Add, fill in the required details and select the App Service Plan as F1 from Dev/Test section. For testing purposes, in real time scenarios this app service plan configurations will be changed based on Application size and usage.

Give App Service Name as DemoPipelines, we will use this name later while configuring Release Pipeline(CD).

Create new Resource Group if doesn’t have one.

For publishing, just select the Code option -- we are not creating Docker Image.

Select Operating System as Windows.

End-To-End CI/CD Automation Using Azure DevOps

Select App Service Plan

Finally, review the details and click on Review and Create

Azure DevOps Portal

Navigate and Login to here

In order to start work on Azure DevOps portal first we should create Organization and within that, Projects.

Create Organization

Click Azure DevOps logo which is in the top left corner and click on “New Organization”. Give an organization name and create it.

Create a Project within the created Organization to place our solutions.

Defining service connections

This feature of DevOps is you can deploy and automate the whole process as long as you have the right permission, it gives access to all resources within the subscription. In our example, you only need to replace the service connections, then you can get this solution up and running in your subscription. You only need to go to Project settings and add a new service connection as shown below

Select Type: Azure Resource Manager -> Give service connection name as DemoPipelinesConnection, we will use this service connection later in Release Pipeline configuration.

Create .Net Application in Visual Studio

Create sample core web application project and build the solution as shown below,

Push code to Repository - We will select this Source code repository later in Build Pipeline(CI), give Repository Name as CoreWebApplication

Click on Add to Source control - > Git -> Cick on Publish Git Repo button as shown below and commit to Master branch.

Create Build Pipeline(CI)

Now we are done with the Project creation and pushed to Azure Repos, now configure build pipeline.

Go to Pipelines - Click on Builds and click on New Pipeline

We can create the build pipeline using YAML file or We can use the Classic editor, in this article we will use YAML file as shown below

Where is your code? - Select Azure Repos Git

Select a repository - Select our targeted Project CoreWebApplication

Configure your pipeline - click on ASP.NET Core. Since we created .NET Core Project, based on project type we can select the respective one here.

Review your pipeline YAML - Click on Save and Run.

Add the following tasks to YAML file, to build and publish the code from Source Repository and to create publish Artifact . We will select this Artifact in Release Pipeline(CD) instead of Repository.

- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
inputs:
command: 'build'
projects: '**/*.csproj'
arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration)'
- task: DotNetCoreCLI@2
inputs:
command: 'publish'
publishWebProjects: true
arguments: '--configuration $(BuildConfiguration) --output $(build.artifactstagingdirectory)'
- task: PublishBuildArtifacts@1
inputs:
PathtoPublish: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)'
ArtifactName: 'drop'
publishLocation: 'Container'

Now click on Save and Run, Saving will commit /azure-pipelines.yml to the repository.

Now Build Pipeline is created, and Build is in progress.

Build has been Completed, and we can see the newly created Build Number. For each build a new Build number will be created.

if we want, we can rename the pipeline name by clicking on Rename/Move option like below

Enable continuous Integration

We can run build pipeline manually or we can enable continuous Integration – whenever we commit the code to selected branch Build pipeline automatically runs.

To add continuous Integration, add a Trigger as shown below

Click on Trigger and check the Override the YAML continuous integration trigger from here and select branch as shown below and click on Save

Now Test the above configured continuous integration trigger.

Let’s go back to Visual Studio and do some changes in Created CoreWebApplication project and see if automated continuous integration has triggered or not

Add comment as “Commit to test continuous integration” as shown below

Push the code to Repository

As shown below, Continuous integration has been triggered , we can check the comment that we have given “Commit to test continuous integration” as the latest build name with a new build number.

We can find the difference between manually triggered build and CI Builds also as shown below:

Build Pipeline execution has been completed successfully as shown below.

Create Release Pipeline(CD)

Now it’s time to create Release pipeline to deploy applications.

We can organize the deployment jobs in your release pipeline into stages. Stages are the major divisions in release pipeline like "Dev", "QA", and "Production" are the examples of release stages.

A stage in a release pipeline consists of jobs and tasks. The deployment of a release to a stage is controlled through approvals and gates, deployment conditions and triggers, and queuing policies.

From Pipelines – Click on Releases and click on New Pipeline

Select Template as “Azure App Service deployment” since we are planning to Deploy our app into Azure App Service.

Add Artifact –This is the place we need to select the above created Build Pipeline’s Artifact

The artifacts published by each version will be available for deployment in release pipelines

Select the Artifact and Click on Add

As above, add a new Stage called Dev and configure Job and Tasks.

Azure subscription – Above defined Service Connection; i.e DemoPipelinesConnection and App Service; i.e., DemoPipelines, here

Configure Agent job, Select Agent Specification as Windows related since we configured our App Service to run on Windows.

Configure Azure App Service deploy, based on our Agent and Artifact configuration. This task's details will be populated automatically so leave them as they are.

We are done with the required configuration, finally click on Save.

Enable Continuous deployment trigger

We can trigger Release pipeline manually or automatically by switching Enabled option as shown below.

Save the changes and Click on Release then Click on Create

Finally go back to Visual Studio and do some changes in Created CoreWebApplication project and see if automated Build and Release pipelines triggered or not.

After pushing the code to Repository automatically the first Build Pipeline will be triggered and after that the new Release pipeline will be triggered as shown below. Complete CI and CD pipelines have run successfully.

Click on Release name or Stage to view the complete details.

If we trigger Release pipeline manually it shows “Manually Triggered” as shown below,

Now navigate to your App Service Url and you can see the latest commits deployed there.