AZ-400 Designing and Implementing Microsoft DevOps Solutions Exam

Integrate GitHub Flow with Azure Pipelines

GitHub Flow is a lightweight, branch-based workflow that facilitates collaboration and simultaneous development on projects. When integrating GitHub Flow with Azure Pipelines, you create a seamless continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) process to ensure your code is tested and deployed efficiently.

Organizing Repositories

Start by organizing your repositories using main and feature branches. The main branch is considered the production-ready code, while feature branches allow developers to work on different parts of the project simultaneously. To maintain a clean and reliable main branch:

• Use branch protection rules to enforce policies such as requiring reviews before merging.
• Employ pull request policies to manage code reviews and discussions around proposed changes before they are merged.

Continuous Integration (CI)

Begin by configuring automated CI pipelines in Azure DevOps. These pipelines will automatically build and test feature branches to ensure new changes do not break existing functionality. Key concepts include:

• Automated Testing: Ensures that new code is compatible with existing code.
• Compliance Checks: Can include running scripts to check for policy compliance, such as the AzurePolicyCheckGate@0 in YAML pipelines.

Continuous Delivery (CD)

Next, integrate continuous delivery workflows where changes in the feature branches are automatically deployed to a staging environment once they pass all tests. To implement this:

• Define release pipelines in Azure DevOps which can promote builds to various environments.
• Use deployment gates such as Check Azure Policy compliance to ensure new deployments meet organizational standards.

Maintaining Traceability

Ensuring traceability of changes is crucial. Use GitHub’s tools to link commits and pull requests to work items in Azure DevOps. This helps keep track of:

• Who made changes and why they were made.
• When changes were made, ensuring each modification is recorded and can be reviewed if necessary.

Collaboration and Communication

Finally, for effective collaboration and communication:

• Utilize pull requests for code reviews and discussions before merging changes.
• Configure notifications in Azure DevOps so teams are aware of deployments and pipeline statuses.

By integrating GitHub Flow with Azure Pipelines, you can create a robust workflow that ensures high-quality code and dependable deployments while maintaining traceability and facilitating efficient collaboration.

Conclusion

In this section, we've covered the integration of GitHub Flow with Azure Pipelines to enhance collaboration, traceability, and dependable deployments. Key points included organizing repositories with main and feature branches, setting up continuous integration for automated testing and compliance checks, configuring continuous delivery workflows for staging environments, maintaining traceability of changes, and fostering collaboration through pull requests and notifications. This structured approach with GitHub Flow and Azure Pipelines ensures that teams can efficiently develop, test, and deploy code in a reliable manner.