Azure DevOps streamlines software development

Azure DevOps is a Microsoft platform that provides an end-to-end tool suite for developing and deploying software. Originally a source code management tool, DevOps was a rebranding of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Services in 2018.

At Pattern, we replaced Jira with DevOps in 2019, and found it to be a seamless way to build and release our websites and apps by covering the full development lifecycle.

Here are some ways we regularly use DevOps for our projects at Pattern.

Boards

DevOps’ Azure boards provide visibility across projects. The Trello-style sprint boards help us define and track tasks to keep dev efforts transparent and on schedule.

Pipelines

Azure Pipelines is a cloud agnostic Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) platform that lets us build, test and deploy our solutions.

With an extensive marketplace for plugins and integrations, infrastructure-as-code can also be incorporated into the pipeline to automate changes to environments from a single location.

Testing

We connect our DevOps projects to GitHub in order to plan, execute and track scripted tests with end-to-end traceability.

Automated workflows ensure robust and reliable deployments, lower failure rates, and faster recovery from incidents.

Monitoring

Infrastructure costs can have a habit of spiralling out of control. In DevOps we use Azure Monitor/ Application Insights to monitor performance, and get actionable alerts from logs. By monitoring, we can pinpoint inefficient areas of the app and bring costs back under control.