What is Azure DevOps? - Azure Tutorial

- [Instructor] As we just saw, DevOps is an approach to managing the conflicting priorities of software development and software operations, and Azure DevOps is a web-based service to help achieve this. It is just one of the vast array of services Microsoft offer under the banner of Azure. There is a similar term, DevSecOps, to cover best practices where developers, operations, and security teams are all working together. As you might imagine, security needs can compete with those of operations and developers because security are trying to neutralize a threat, while operations want to keep everything running, and developers want to create new software. Really, it's like a family. Developers are the kids creating mess and chaos and experimenting everywhere. Operations teams are the parents frantically tidying up, organizing everyone and getting no thanks. And the security teams are anxious Aunt Ethel, who keeps shouting, "Be careful, mind that car." DevOps encourages cross-functional teams to work together through the entire software development lifecycle, from planning and coding, to testing, deployment and monitoring. There are a few core principles that define DevOps. All the buzzwords. Collaboration between teams, automation of manual tasks, continuous integration, merging code changes into a shared central place. Continuous delivery, which helps to publish the code into testing or production environments, and monitoring and feedback of applications. You might hear the terms "DevOps" and "agile" in the same sentence, or even mistaken for each other. They are not quite the same thing, but they are similar. DevOps enables faster and more reliable software delivery. Agile is a project management philosophy that favors frequent incremental bursts of work with regular feedback from stakeholders. Agile began in software development, but this project management style can be used for anything. So let's look at how Azure approaches DevOps. This is the Azure portal, as you can see from the URL. I'm sure there must be a way to navigate from the portal to DevOps, but I have yet to find it. If you can see this "A" symbol, you are in the wrong place for ADO. If you can see this funny rectangle symbol, you are in the right place. Azure DevOps is, at a basic level, a website. The purpose of the website is to help developers and operations teams to collaborate and continuously integrate and deploy their code. ADO helps the entire software development lifecycle, from planning to publishing. This course will focus on the planning and management of bite-sized chunks of development work called Work Items. Example work items are features, stories, and bugs. So you can see on the left hand side we have Overview Boards, Repose, Pipelines, Test Plans and Artifacts. We won't be looking in any depth at the last four. They are for developers to manage and deploy their code. Our area of interest is squarely in Overview and Boards. Although ADO is designed to deal with software development, it could easily be used to manage parcels of work between remote teams in any number of work areas. For example, research or case management. Now that we have a foundation for DevOps, we'll delve deeper into each component of Azure DevOps, giving you practical insights and skills to navigate and use this powerful tool.