Microsoft Azure DevOps Project for CI/CD
The Azure DevOps Project presents a simplified experience where you bring your existing code and Git repository, or choose from one of the sample applications to create a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipeline to Azure. The DevOps project automatically creates Azure resources such as a new Azure virtual machine, creates and configures a release pipeline in VSTS that includes a build definition for CI, sets up a release definition for CD, and then creates an Azure Application Insights resource for monitoring.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) gives you benefits like :
- Consistency in naming conventions of Azure components
- Working together in the same way with your company policies
- Reusability of Templates
- Automatic documentation and CMDB of deployments in your repository
- Rapid deployments
- Flexibility and Scalability in code for Azure Deployments
As an Large Enterprise Company you don’t want to Click and Type in the Azure Portal with lot of employees to get the job done in a consistent way. The changes and deployments will be different in time because people can make mistakes. For Developers it’s important to make your building process before you publish your application, so why not for DevOps and ITpro to do the same thing for Infrastructure.
In the following step-by-step guide you will learn how to make a Microsoft Azure DevOps Project and make a CI/CD Pipeline deploying a virtual machine with your ASP.net Application.
Prerequisites :
An Azure subscription. You can get one free through Visual Studio Dev Essentials.
Access to a GitHub or external Git repository that contains .NET, Java, PHP, Node, Python, or static web code.
Here you find the GitHub for Developer Guide
When you have your prerequisites in place you can start with the following steps :
Search for DevOps at All Services in the Azure Portal
Select .NET and Click on Next
You can see where you are in the flow of creating your CI/CD Pipeline, when you need a Azure SQL Database for your ASP.net application you can select Add a Database (Option). This will provide you Azure SQL as a Service (PaaS).
Database-as-a-Service
(I didn’t Choose for SQL)
In this step select Virtual Machine and click Next
From here you can create a VSTS account or your Existing account of Visual Studio Team Services. After selecting VSTS you can manage your Azure settings and by clicking on Change you can select the Azure options.
Select the Virtual Machine you need for your Application.
Here you see the Deployment Running
Important for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), the Deployment template can be saved into the library and / or you can download it for reusability or make your own policies into the template.
When you save it into the Azure Library you get the release notes and who’s the publisher
In the Microsoft Azure DevOps Project main Dashboard you will see the status of your CI/CD Pipeline and that release is in progress or not. On the right-side of the Dashboard you see the Azure resources like the Application endpoint, the Virtual Machine and Application Insights for monitoring. When the CI/CD Pipeline deployment is succeeded you can browse to your ASP.net Application.
Your Application.
Your Virtual Machine Running and in the Monitoring.
The Microsoft Azure DevOps Project CI/CD Pipeline is Completed.
Application Insights is an extensible Application Performance Management (APM) service for web developers on multiple platforms. Use it to monitor your live web application. It will automatically detect performance anomalies. It includes powerful analytics tools to help you diagnose issues and to understand what users actually do with your app. It’s designed to help you continuously improve performance and usability. It works for apps on a wide variety of platforms including .NET, Node.js and J2EE, hosted on-premises or in the cloud. It integrates with your DevOps process, and has connection points to a variety of development tools. It can monitor and analyze telemetry from mobile apps by integrating with Visual Studio App Center and HockeyApp.
You can drill down into the error to see what is happening.
Azure Application Insights topology
Application Insights is aimed at the development team, to help you understand how your app is performing and how it’s being used. It monitors:
Request rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out which pages are most popular, at what times of day, and where your users are. See which pages perform best. If your response times and failure rates go high when there are more requests, then perhaps you have a resourcing problem.
Dependency rates, response times, and failure rates – Find out whether external services are slowing you down.
Exceptions – Analyse the aggregated statistics, or pick specific instances and drill into the stack trace and related requests. Both server and browser exceptions are reported.
Page views and load performance – reported by your users’ browsers.
AJAX calls from web pages – rates, response times, and failure rates.
User and session counts.
Performance counters from your Windows or Linux server machines, such as CPU, memory, and network usage.
Host diagnostics from Docker or Azure.
Diagnostic trace logs from your app – so that you can correlate trace events with requests.
Custom events and metrics that you write yourself in the client or server code, to track business events such as items sold or games won.
You can also drill down into Microsoft Azure Log Analytics and run your analytics queries to get the right information you want for troubleshooting. More information on Azure Log Analytics and queries is on MSFT docs.
From App Insight we see it was an Exception error
Because the Azure DevOps Project is connected with VSTS you can follow the Build and Release here to and you got your documentation of the CI/CD Pipeline.
From here you can work with your Developers and DevOps and manage the User and Groups security in de CI/CD Pipeline for the next Build. Working together to build innovative apps via VSTS from one Dashboard :
VSTS Dashboard
Next day you see it was one time error and the Pipeline is running Fine 😉
For more information about all the possibilities with Microsoft Azure DevOps Project go to MSFT Docs
DevOps and Microsoft :
DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users.
To Learn DevOps please visit this Microsoft DevOps Site
Conclusion :
Invest in your CI/CD Pipeline and make your own environment is important before you deploy into Azure production for your business. Make your ARM Templates and Code in repositories like Git or VSTS. When you have this all in place your are more in control of your consistent Deployments and Changes in the Azure Cloud. I hope this blogpost is useful for you and your Company. Start today with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and get the benefits 😉
