My 10 Steps Functional Flow Understanding of CI/CD Pipeline

…using Azure DevOps Server/Service

Sometimes explaining CI/CD flow to many peoples becomes challenging especially if he/she is new to the DevOps world. Having a background of Infrastructure, It was very difficult for me to visualize and understand the DevOps process flow from application standpoint.

In order to make things simple to understand and share my knowledge. I have outlined 10 steps considering Azure DevOps service (one of my favorite).

Just to give you a quick overview on Azure DevOps It’s a Microsoft product that provides version control, reporting, requirements management, project management, automated builds, testing and release management capabilities. It covers the entire application lifecycle, and enables DevOps capabilities.

Functional Flow and how it operates:

1. For Agile Planning & Collaboration we need to have a tool/service where all the details about the project and activities are recorded. So, In Step-1 a developer/team fetches information from Azure Board
2. In Step-2 the developer/team start acting on the task and by writing code using any Integrated development environment (can be Vs-code, IntelliJ, eclipse, etc…)
3. All the edited code from the developers are synced to Source code repository, which is Azure Repo, which act’s as a version control system.
4. Once your code is synced in version control system, then the next step is to trigger build which is performed by Azure Pipelines and in the Build task the pipeline amend all individual task of application building.
5. The build pipeline tries to publish build information and packages with the help of Azure Artifacts
6. To fetch dependencies from the nugget package manager which is cached offline or downloaded from the Artifacts package manager to feed azure artifacts for application build purpose.
7. During this process the build Application undergoes certain tests where Azure test plans comes in picture and performs the application testing (an automated test process) and displays the results on the central dashboard.
8. Once the application is tested and final package is built, then the Azure Release Pipeline comes in picture and deploy the packages in any defined environment (Staging-Development-Acceptance-Production)
9. After the modified/updated packages are published on the azure environment, then a developer/team updates the assigned task with comments on the Azure Board.
10. By integrating with communication channel like (MS-Teams, Slack, Outlook, etc…) the developer/team can get continuous feedback on the task activities performed for the given application.

The above 10-Steps are easy to understand a quick functional flow overview of CI/CD Pipeline using Azure DevOps server/service.

for more details on the product I request you to please visit Azure DevOps site. and watch an introduction video for quick understanding.