Choose the best tools to help organizations build better solutions

Understand your product options

Software developers and operations professionals strive to create working software systems that satisfy the needs of the organization. However, sometimes their short-term objectives are at cross-purposes, which can result in technical issues, delays, and downtime.

DevOps is a new approach that helps to align technical teams as they work toward common goals. To accomplish this alignment, organizations employ practices and processes that seek to automate the ongoing development, maintenance, and deployment of software systems. Their aim is to expedite the release of software changes, ensure the ongoing deployability of the system, and ensure that all changes meet a high quality bar.

When done correctly, DevOps practices and processes touch nearly every aspect of the company, not to mention the software development lifecycle, including planning, project management, and the collaboration of software developers with each other and with operations and quality assurance teams. Tooling automates and enforces most of the practices and processes, making it both difficult and unnecessary to work around.

DevOps requires a fundamental mindset change from the top down. Organizations can't merely install software tools or adopt services and hope to get all of the benefits promised by DevOps.

In this module, we'll focus only on the Microsoft tools that can help accomplish some of the DevOps objectives. Alternately, organizations that aren't ready to fully embrace the power of DevOps can support technical teams in their cloud development activities. If you're interested in learning more about DevOps in general, Microsoft Learn has several learning paths and modules that can help you.

Microsoft offers tools to enable source-code management, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), and automating the creation of testing environments. Sometimes, it seems as though these tools overlap in functionality, so in this module you'll learn about several product options, and when to choose one product over another.

Product options

At a high level, there are three primary offerings, each of which is aimed at a specific audience and use case and provides a diverse set of tools, services, programmatic APIs, and more.

Azure DevOps Services

Azure DevOps Services is a suite of services that address every stage of the software development lifecycle.

• Azure Repos is a centralized source-code repository where software development, DevOps engineering, and documentation professionals can publish their code for review and collaboration.
• Azure Boards is an agile project management suite that includes Kanban boards, reporting, and tracking ideas and work from high-level epics to work items and issues.
• Azure Pipelines is a CI/CD pipeline automation tool.
• Azure Artifacts is a repository for hosting artifacts, such as compiled source code, which can be fed into testing or deployment pipeline steps.
• Azure Test Plans is an automated test tool that can be used in a CI/CD pipeline to ensure quality before a software release.

Azure DevOps is a mature tool with a large feature set that began as on-premises server software and evolved into a software as a service (SaaS) offering from Microsoft.

GitHub and GitHub Actions

GitHub is arguably the world's most popular code repository for open-source software. Git is a decentralized source-code management tool, and GitHub is a hosted version of Git that serves as the primary remote. GitHub builds on top of Git to provide related services for coordinating work, reporting and discussing issues, providing documentation, and more. It offers the following functionality:

• It's a shared source-code repository, including tools that enable developers to perform code reviews by adding comments and questions in a web view of the source code before it can be merged into the main code base.
• It facilitates project management, including Kanban boards.
• It supports issue reporting, discussion, and tracking.
• It features CI/CD pipeline automation tooling.
• It includes a wiki for collaborative documentation.
• It can be run from the cloud or on-premises

Most relevant for this module, GitHub Actions enables workflow automation with triggers for many lifecycle events. One such example would be automating a CI/CD toolchain.

A toolchain is a combination of software tools that aid in the delivery, development, and management of software applications throughout a system's development lifecycle. The output of one tool in the toolchain is the input of the next tool in the toolchain. Typical tool functions range from performing automated dependency updates to building and configuring the software, delivering the build artifacts to various locations, testing, and so on.

With such similarity between many GitHub and Azure DevOps features, you might wonder which product to choose for your organization. Unfortunately, the answer might not be straightforward.

Although both Azure DevOps and GitHub allow public and private code repositories, GitHub has a long history with public repositories and is trusted by tens of thousands of open-source project owners. GitHub is a lighter-weight tool than Azure DevOps, with a focus on individual developers contributing to the open-source code. Azure DevOps, on the other hand, is more focused on enterprise development, with heavier project-management and planning tools, and finer-grained access control.

Azure DevTest Labs

Azure DevTest Labs provides an automated means of managing the process of building, setting up, and tearing down virtual machines (VMs) that contain builds of your software projects. This way, developers and testers can perform tests across a variety of environments and builds. And this capability isn't limited to VMs. Anything you can deploy in Azure via an ARM template can be provisioned through DevTest Labs. Provisioning pre-created lab environments with their required configurations and tools already installed is a huge time saver for quality assurance professionals and developers.

Suppose you need to test a new feature on an old version of an operating system. Azure DevTest Labs can set up everything automatically upon request. After the testing is complete, DevTest Labs can shut down and deprovision the VM, which saves money when it's not in use. To control costs, the management team can restrict how many labs can be created, how long they run, and so on.

Analyze the decision criteria

In this unit, you'll analyze the criteria that experts employ when they choose DevOps tools or services to address specific business needs. Understanding the criteria can also help you better understand the nuanced differences between each product.

Do you need to automate and manage test-lab creation?

If your aim is to automate the creation and management of a test lab environment, consider choosing Azure DevTest Labs. Among the three tools and services we've described, it's the only one that offers this functionality.

However, you can automate the provisioning of new labs as part of a toolchain by using Azure Pipelines or GitHub Actions.

Are you building open-source software?

Although Azure DevOps can publish public code repositories, GitHub has long been the preferred host for open-source software. If you're building open-source software, you would likely choose GitHub if for no other reasons than its visibility and general acceptance by the open-source development community.

The remaining decision criteria are specific to choosing between either Azure DevOps or GitHub.

Regarding source-code management and DevOps tools, what level of granularity do you need for permissions?

GitHub works on a simple model of read/write permissions to every feature. Meanwhile, Azure DevOps has a much more granular set of permissions that allow organizations to refine who is able to perform most operations across the entire toolset.

Regarding source-code management and DevOps tools, how sophisticated does your project management and reporting need to be?

Although GitHub has work items, issues, and a Kanban board, project management and reporting is the area where Azure DevOps excels. Azure DevOps is highly customizable, which allows an administrator to add custom fields to capture metadata and other information alongside each work item. By contrast, the GitHub Issues feature uses tags as its primary means of helping a team categorize issues.

Regarding source-code management and DevOps tools, how tightly do you need to integrate with third-party tools?

Although we make no specific recommendations about third-party tools, it's important for you to understand your organization's existing investments in tools and services and to evaluate how these dependencies might affect your choice. It's likely that most vendors that create DevOps tools create hooks or APIs that can be used by both Azure Pipelines and GitHub Actions. Even so, it's probably worth the effort to validate that assumption.

Use Azure DevOps to manage the application development lifecycle

The software development team at Tailwind Traders works on many different projects, both for internal and external usage. The team needs to give project sponsors and managers executive level reporting, including burndown charts, track progress against epics, and track custom information that's specific to Tailwind Traders in each work item and bug report.

As Tailwind Traders grows and hires contractors and outside vendors for short-term work, the upper management team wants to ensure that these individuals have access only to the information they need to do their work.

Which services should we choose?

Apply the decision criteria you learned about in the preceding unit to find the right option.

First, does Tailwind Traders need to automate and manage test lab creation? No. So, in this scenario, Azure DevTest Labs is not a candidate, because it isn't intended for this specific use case.

Second, is Tailwind Traders building open-source software? Though it's not stated specifically, Tailwind Traders is building internal and external systems, such as their e-commerce system, which isn't open source. So that isn't a consideration in this scenario.

Third, what level of granularity does Tailwind Traders need for permissions? Earlier, we stated that Tailwind Traders will hire temporary employees and vendors for short-term work, which makes a granular permissions requirement an important consideration for upper management. Based on our description in the preceding unit, this feature would make Azure DevOps a leading candidate. By using Azure DevOps, Tailwind Traders administrators would also have a more robust set of options for controlling permissions across the entire portfolio of work.

Fourth, does Tailwind Traders require a sophisticated project management and reporting solution? Yes, robust project management and reporting features are one of the primary considerations. Here again, because of the amount of work-item customization and reporting the management team wants, Azure DevOps would likely be a good choice.

Fifth, does Tailwind Traders require tight integration with any third-party DevOps tools? Tool integration was not listed as a primary consideration for this scenario. As you learned in the preceding unit, most third-party DevOps tools integrate with both Azure DevOps and GitHub, which makes it likely that the team will find the tools it needs.

Use GitHub to contribute to open-source software

Tailwind Traders hopes to publish an API that would allow third parties to integrate their own inventories of new and used items. This approach would allow Tailwind Traders to offer a wider variety of products directly from their e-commerce site.

Although the internal implementation of the API is closed source, Tailwind Traders wants to create a set of examples that call the API to perform various actions. The team needs a platform to share example code, collect feedback on the API, allow contributors to report issues, and build a community around feature requests.

Which service should you choose?

Apply the decision criteria you learned about earlier to find the right option.

First, does Tailwind Traders need to automate and manage test lab creation? No. In this scenario, Azure DevTest Labs is not a candidate because it isn't designed for this use case.

Second, is Tailwind Traders building open-source software? Yes. As we noted in a previous unit, developers are used to seeing this kind of content available on GitHub. With GitHub, Tailwind Traders developers can publish their code, accept community contributions to improve the code examples, accept feedback and bug reports, and more. Because this scenario involves open-source code, GitHub is a leading candidate.

Third, what level of granularity does the Tailwind Traders team need for assigning permissions? Though it's not stated explicitly, the fact that Tailwind Traders will be accepting community contributions, issuing reports, and generally attempting to build a community of developers around their API examples, the company's permission needs are basic: users can either view only or view and write. This is another reason why GitHub would be a good candidate for this scenario.

Fourth, does Tailwind Traders require a sophisticated project management and reporting solution? Again, because of the nature of this project, the team doesn't require a sophisticated project management and reporting solution. In this scenario, the strength of Azure DevOps Services isn't required.

Fifth, does Tailwind Traders require tight integration with any third-party DevOps tools? Tool integration wasn't listed as a primary consideration for this scenario and doesn't qualify or disqualify either tool.

GitHub is the best choice for this scenario. Although you could use Azure DevOps to make the repository public, some of the other features that involve the development community, such as feedback or bug reports, would be less accessible.

Use Azure DevTest Labs to manage testing environments

Tailwind Traders wants to be more methodical and careful when it pushes new versions of its e-commerce website to production. The company will expand its quality assurance (QA) team, and it will use the cloud to create and host virtual machines (VMs). Through this approach, it will create testing environments that match the production environment.

The management team has concerns around the costs of a more automated test environment. For instance, it wants to make sure that the QA professionals are not wasting time configuring the testing environment to match the production environment. The team wants to ensure that the VMs are destroyed when they're no longer in use. It wants to limit the number of VMs that each QA professional is allowed to spin up. Also, the team wants to ensure that each environment is configured correctly and consistent with the production environment.

Which service should you choose?

Once again, start by applying the decision criteria you learned about previously to find the right product.

First, does Tailwind Traders need to automate and manage test lab creation? Yes. This looks like a job for Azure DevTest Labs, because it can do everything that the team needs to accomplish in this scenario.

We could continue evaluating the decision criteria, but neither Azure DevOps nor GitHub is needed for this scenario. Remember that either Azure DevOps or GitHub could be used to create product releases that can automatically be included in any VMs that you create for testing purposes.

Summary

The goal in this module was to help Tailwind Traders choose the best DevOps solution for a set of requirements across various software development and testing needs.

We identified various product options and capabilities, including Azure DevOps Services, GitHub (including GitHub Actions), and Azure DevTest Labs. We analyzed the criteria for choosing one option over another for each scenario. Then we applied those criteria to three separate challenges at Tailwind Traders, helping the team determine the best service option for the scenarios.

Without software development services and tools from Microsoft, the Tailwind Traders team might have difficulty in realizing the benefits of such DevOps practices as continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), source-code management, and work-item management.

DevOps practices and processes have changed the software development landscape, helping to accelerate software development and improve the deployability and quality of software systems. Microsoft offers a wealth of tools that can help organizations implement DevOps practices, experience better collaboration among technical teams, and achieve more consistent results from those teams.