Azure DevOps
Combining automation with a love of people and cultural change
Your business relies heavily on technology, and so rapid and reliable software development is increasingly an everyday demand in order to meet the needs of your ever growing and impatient customers. At Assemblysoft, we believe that Azure DevOps, with its potential to combine automation with cultural change and business value, offers the right approach to efficiently build, test and bring software to market, on time, everytime.
By engaging with Assemblysoft for your Azure DevOps pipeline requirements you will not only gain from deterministic release cycles but also improve your processes and workflows, each and every iteration, as we leverage our real world experience to enable you to automate and further innovate as we feed back into the pipelines the retrospective insights gained and listen to your valued input.
Your workflow becomes more robust, smarter and let's you focus on adding value to your products without the pain of releasing to production, resulting in happier customers!
Our Approach
We are so confident in our Azure DevOps approach that we use the same technologies, methodologies and philosophies in our own business, as we do on behalf of our clients. At Assemblysoft we’re proud to have designed some complex and demanding build and release pipelines for our customers, gaining some deep insights, having utilised a vast array of resources inside Microsoft Azure and Azure DevOps.
There are five core areas to our DevOps approach at Assemblysoft that, when combined result in minimum effort for maximum value, delivering safely, early and often.
- Continuously building, testing and deploying solutions that are fit for purpose. We help clients to build in short cycles so new applications and services can be reliably and quickly released to customers on demand. With effective automation, you will reduce cost by reducing manual effort and human error.
- Maximising communication and collaboration – having the right people, doing the right job, at the right time. We help clients to promote internal innovation, communication, collaboration and alignment. Rather than superheroes, you benefit from cross-functional teamwork.
- Operation and Feedback. We help clients to get their software out to their own customers as early as possible, and through operations the ability to gather structured user feedback, without affecting your core set of customers, that drives informed decisions for the next round of development.
- Measure, visualise and realise business value. We provide clients with actionable quality and business intelligence to eliminate waste, build change into the process and maximize the delivery of valuable software.
- Transparent, up to the minute insights. We love people, we love code, but there is often a disconnected void between the project and the client insights. That is why we are changing the game in the way our clients can choose to work with us. You gain realtime smarts by being a part of our engineering teams as we develop your solution - LIVE! Talk to us about our 'Engineering Insights' plan to enable you and your team to watch our experts at work on your project, where you gain immediate confidence, in real time, collaborating directly over our futures network to really maximise your return and play a part in shaping your baby. See for yourselves why we are out of this world when it comes leveraging the smarts that give you the edge as it happens!
DevOps brings benefits across the development, delivery and operations life cycle, but adoption carries real risks if businesses view it simply as a technology solution and ignore the people aspects. Without leadership, collaboration and internal buy-in, DevOps can even prove counterproductive, by slowing down processes, stifling innovation, creating siloes and building products that don’t respond to market needs.
When the right behaviours become second nature across the business, DevOps will greatly contribute to creating an agile, value driven culture that can adapt to the rapidly-changing world around you.
At Assemblysoft our DevOps approach, having utilised Micosoft Azure and Azure DevOps from it's inception in the real world, along with a rich portfolio of engineering services can provide both capability and capacity to your business enabling agility and speed that you can pass onto your customers.
What is it and why should you be interested?
The term DevOps is a combination of two terms: development (Dev) and operations (Ops). This term was created as a way of combining software engineering, operations culture, and practices to unify software development and software operations. The primary goal of DevOps is to strongly integrate automation and monitoring at all steps of the software development life cycle (SDLC), from integration, testing, releasing, to deployment and infrastructure management. DevOps aims to shorten development cycles, increase deployment frequency, and add quality with dependable releases, all in close alignment with business objectives.
Some Azure DevOps Authorisation notes and references from a recent prod pipeline i thought i would share. https://t.co/va0GKhuQlUhttps://t.co/boNdqE3wsX #azuredevops
— Carl Randall (@Carl_Randall) March 10, 2020
At a Glance
- Code development: Continuously building, testing and deploying products.
- Build: Continuous integration tools, build status.
- Test: Continuous testing tools that provide feedback on business risks.
- Package: Artifact repository, application pre-deployment staging.
- Release: Change management, release approvals, release automation.
- Configure: Infrastructure configuration and management, Infrastructure as Code.
- Monitor: Applications performance monitoring, end–user experience.
- Deep Insights: No need to wait for the end of the week to understand progress.
Relevant use cases
Consider Azure DevOps and CI/CD processes for:
- Accelerating application development and development lifecycles
- Building quality and consistency into an automated build and release process
- Increasing application stability and uptime.
Architecture
The data flows through the scenario as follows:
- A developer changes application source code.
- Application code including the web.config file is committed to the source code repository in Azure Repos.
- Continuous integration triggers application build and unit tests using Azure Test Plans.
- Continuous deployment within Azure Pipelines triggers an automated deployment of application artifacts with environment-specific configuration values.
- The artifacts are deployed to Azure App Service.
- Azure Application Insights collects and analyzes health, performance, and usage data.
- Developers monitor and manage health, performance, and usage information.
- Backlog information is used to prioritize new features and bug fixes using Azure Boards.
The need for DevOps has grown out of the increasing success of Agile software development, which has led to organisations, just like yours, realising the need for releasing applications and services more rapidly and at higher velocity. As companies seek to overcome the constraints put on their release management processes, it becomes clear there is a real need to adopt processes that can support application release automation, continuous integration (CI) tools, and continuous delivery (CD).
Let's talk about DevOpsLet Assemblysoft assist you, with moving to Azure DevOps or enhancing your existing development processes with automation, to gain a major advantage, huge cost reduction and peace of mind for your entire organisation whether large or small.
Start a meaningful conversation with us today.
Assemblysoft are Your Safe Pair of Hands
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Azure DevOps
