Continuous Integration: CD

Name: Continuous Integration: CD
Author: Steven Burnley

Learn how to use and configure continuous delivery pipelines to deploy software to production servers

Preview the first lesson free — get full access to all 5 lessons.

Course: On-Demand

Hello, my name is Stephen Burnley and in these lessons you will learn about continuous delivery. Continuous delivery is part of the DevOps process and is used to deploy software applications after they have been built with the continuous integration process. We will also review how to build a CD pipeline to pick up after a continuous integration pipeline is complete. We will also see how to monitor running pipelines, look for errors, and rerun pipelines to do troubleshooting. Here you can see in the Azure DevOps portal we have a sample application called Parts Unlimited. Let's select the sample application now. In the Parts Unlimited project you can see that this DevOps project includes the Azure boards for requirements management, the Azure repo for source code management, and pipelines for performing CI and CD tasks. Let's select the pipelines for the Parts Unlimited project. Here in the pipelines you can see the existing continuous integration pipelines or CI pipelines. These are a prerequisite to running continuous delivery pipelines. That's because continuous integration pipelines perform the checkout and build of your raw source code into a running software binary which is typically called on software artifact. These artifacts are stored in a staging directory. After selecting the Parts Unlimited continuous integration pipeline, let's click Edit to view this process. You can now see in this continuous integration pipeline which is built on the YAML syntax. We can scroll down to the bottom and we can see that the last task is publishing this to a staging directory. This is the end of continuous integration. What we will do now is look at continuous delivery to take this artifact and install it on some sort of running server environment. Let's click on releases on the left-hand side of the screen to view the existing CD process. Now that we have selected releases for the Parts Unlimited project, this is an example of a continuous delivery pipeline. Let's select that now. We can also click the Edit button at the top of the screen to view how this particular pipeline is structured. This is an example of a continuous delivery pipeline. The first thing that is true about continuous delivery is that it must begin where the continuous integration process ends. This is reflected in this pipeline on the left-hand side of the screen under Artifacts. Let's select the Parts Unlimited E2E artifact. This Parts Unlimited E2E artifact is the result of the continuous integration pipeline that we had previously viewed. You can see that this is going to pick up a compiled binary from an artifact folder and prepare that for delivery or installation on servers. This will be done by the stages block to the right. Let's click on the lightning bolt in the upper right-hand corner of the Parts Unlimited E2E block. You can see in the upper right-hand corner for continuous deployment trigger that we currently have this set to enabled. This means that every time that there is a new artifact created by the Parts Unlimited E2E continuous integration build, it will automatically trigger this continuous deployment pipeline. Let's take a look at a few of the existing blocks in the staging section. Let's click on Dev. Now that we have clicked on the Dev block, the screen has changed to show us the continuous delivery process. Continuous delivery processes will authenticate with some sort of hosting environment to deploy your application. Web applications could run in three different places. They could run on a virtual machine. They could run as a container or in Kubernetes. Or they could be deployed as a web application serverless application. You can see here that if we click on Azure deployment that it's going to ask us to authenticate with our Azure subscription so that we could potentially deploy this application to a cloud resource. This allows us to do our builds in the Azure DevOps portal but host our application in the actual Azure cloud. Let's click back on the pipeline to look at the additional configuration blocks. We can see here that the stages are named Dev QA and Production. You can see here that we now have set up automatic compile and builds through continuous integration and now automated software installation to the Dev environment. QA and Production usually do not receive the deployment immediately. In this example, the next stage is QA. By installing the software on the QA server, you are usually opening up evaluation and testing of this software to members outside the immediate development team. Once the QA testing is complete, you can see here that we will use a production block to deploy this to a production server. One thing to notice about these blocks is that they are almost all exactly the same in terms of their configuration. That's because we usually need to deploy the same binary artifact that was created by the continuous integration process to common server definitions. This means that as an Azure cloud engineer, you would set up a web application for development teams, a web application for QA and a web application for production. This would allow you to install your software in environments that are not in production to give your team a chance to evaluate them to determine if they are appropriate to promote. The advantage of doing this in an automated way is that humans only have to be involved for approving software products so that they can move through this process. This is what the last block on these stages are. If I click on post-deployment conditions, you can see that we could implement post-deployment approvals by humans. If we turn this on, we could select user accounts from our Azure Active Directory and ask those users to receive email messages to request that they test the software and vote whether it should be approved for the next stage or not. We can also do automated testing with software development tools by implementing something called software gates. This allows us to check the results of automated software testing and let those results determine whether the application should be promoted. Stay tuned for the next lesson where we will actually build continuous delivery pipelines and run them in the Azure portal. We will build pipelines using the two different formats in the Azure pipeline editor, which would be the traditional classic editor as well as editing and building CB pipelines in the new modern EMO editor. Thanks for watching.

Intermediate Provider : Steven Burnley 5 Lessons · 29m in English

Course Description

At its core, a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline consists of a series of stages and tasks that define the steps involved in building, testing, and deploying an application. These pipelines can be easily configured and customized to meet specific project needs. Azure DevOps provides a wide range of built-in tasks and extensions that can be leveraged within CD pipelines. Integrations with other Azure services like Azure Container Registry, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure App Service allow you to deploy applications to different target environments easily. The CD pipelines in Azure DevOps also offer robust monitoring and reporting capabilities, allowing teams to track the progress of deployments, identify issues, and gain insights into the overall health and performance of their applications. Azure DevOps CD pipelines empower development teams to automate the entire software release process, enabling frequent and reliable deployments while maintaining high quality and reducing time-to-market.

In this course, you will learn how continuous delivery pipelines in Azure DevOps enable seamless and automated software deployment. We will discuss how you can automate the build, test, and release processes to ensure rapid and reliable delivery of software changes. By the end of this course, you will be able to utilize the built-in integrations, version control, and extensive customization options of Azure DevOps pipelines to streamline and optimize your software development lifecycle.

What You'll Learn

Understand the role and importance of continuous delivery (CD) pipelines
Explain how to create a CD pipeline in Azure DevOps
Explore best practices for working with CD pipelines
Automate the build, test, and release processes for rapid and reliable software delivery
Execute and monitor a CD pipeline in Azure DevOps
Leverage built-in integrations, version control, and customization options to streamline the software development lifecycle

Key Takeaways

A continuous delivery (CD) pipeline consists of a series of stages and tasks that define the steps for building, testing, and deploying an application.
Azure DevOps provides built-in tasks and extensions, plus integrations with Azure Container Registry, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure App Service for deploying to different target environments.
CD pipelines in Azure DevOps offer monitoring and reporting capabilities to track deployment progress, identify issues, and gain insights into application health and performance.
Azure DevOps CD pipelines automate the entire software release process, enabling frequent and reliable deployments while maintaining quality and reducing time-to-market.
Azure DevOps pipelines can be easily configured and customized to meet specific project needs.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this course cover?

The course covers how continuous delivery pipelines in Azure DevOps enable seamless and automated software deployment, including how to automate the build, test, and release processes for rapid and reliable delivery of software changes.

What skills will I gain from this course?

You will gain skills in Azure DevOps, Azure Pipelines, Continuous Delivery, Continuous Deployment, Continuous Integration, and DevOps.

What will I be able to do by the end of the course?

By the end of the course, you will be able to utilize the built-in integrations, version control, and extensive customization options of Azure DevOps pipelines to streamline and optimize your software development lifecycle.

What topics are taught in the lessons?

The lessons cover CD Pipeline Concepts, Building a CD Pipeline (Parts 1 and 2), and Executing and Monitoring a CD Pipeline (Parts 1 and 2).

How is the course structured?

The course is organized into five lessons: CD Pipeline Concepts; Building a CD Pipeline (Part 1); Building a CD Pipeline (Part 2); Executing and Monitoring a CD Pipeline (Part 1); and Executing and Monitoring a CD Pipeline (Part 2).