DevOps is a principle that bridges the gap between your development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams. This fosters better collaboration and increased productivity. The main aim of DevOps is to automate infrastructure, streamline workflows, and continuously measure application performance.
Companies that Hire DevOps engineers have experienced many benefits. 61% of businesses reported that it helped them produce higher-quality deliverables, while 49% saw a faster time to market.
In this blog, you will discover the best practices that can help you boost the benefits of Azure DevOps for your business.
What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps consists of a collection of tools and services that promote collaboration and a series of procedures to unite developers, project managers, and other team members. It allows organizations to accelerate the development and enhancement of products compared to conventional software development approaches.
You can use Azure DevOps in the cloud via Azure DevOps Services or on-premises with Azure DevOps Server.
Azure DevOps Services vs. Azure DevOps Server
- Azure DevOps Services: This cloud-based offering is scalable, reliable, and globally available. It boasts a 99.9% SLA, ensuring high availability and performance, and is supported by a 24/7 operations team.
- Azure DevOps Server: An on-premises solution built on a SQL Server back end, preferred by organizations that need to keep their data within their network for security or compliance reasons.
Azure DevOps Best Practices
Azure DevOps includes several integrated features you can access through a web browser or an IDE client. You can use all these services together or just the ones that complement your existing workflows. Azure DevOps also allows you to add extensions and integrate with other popular services, such as Campfire, Slack, Trello, and UserVoice, or develop custom extensions.
Let’s explore the best practices for each key part of Azure DevOps.
Azure DevOps Best Practices for Key Components
Azure Boards
Azure Boards is a web-based service that helps teams plan, track, and discuss work across the entire development process. It supports agile methodologies and provides a customizable platform for managing work items.
Best Practices of Azure Boards:
- Use Epics, Features, and User Stories: Organize your work hierarchically to ensure clarity and manageability. This structure helps break down large tasks into manageable pieces.
- Queries and Dashboards: Use these tools to track project progress and create reports. This visibility helps teams stay on top of their tasks and quickly find bottlenecks.
Azure Repos
Azure Repos provides source control through Git repositories or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC). These tools help manage code changes and collaborate on projects effectively.
Best Practices of Azure Repos:
- Branch Strategy: Implement a branching strategy like Git Flow or Feature branching to manage your codebase effectively. This approach helps organize work and eases smooth change integration.
- Code Reviews: Use pull requests for code reviews to maintain code quality. Peer reviews will help catch errors early and meet coding standards.
Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines comes with build and release services. These services support continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) of your applications.
Best Practices of Azure Pipelines:
- Infrastructure as Code: Manage your environments with infrastructure as a code to ensure consistency and repeatability.
- Automatic Builds: Set up automatic builds for every push to a significant branch to detect issues early in the development cycle.
- Automatic Tests: Integrate automated tests into your CI/CD pipeline to ensure that changes don’t introduce new bugs.
- Environment Promotion: Set up different environments (development, testing, production) and promote artifacts between them. In DevOps, components are the software components generated throughout the software development process. They ensure that all software elements collaborate effectively to fulfill project needs. This approach helps in confirming adjustments in a structured way.
- Parameterization: Use parameters to make your pipelines reusable and flexible, reducing redundancy and simplifying management. Azure Pipelines supports several types of parameters:
- String: Accepts a string value
- Boolean: Accepts a true/false value
- Choice: Allows selecting from a predefined list of options
- Secrets: Securely stores sensitive information like passwords or API keys
Azure Test Plans
Azure Test Plans provides manual, exploratory, and continuous testing tools, helping ensure your applications are reliable and meet quality standards.
- Test Automation: Integrate automated tests to get fast feedback on changes. Automated testing helps catch issues early. Thus, you don’t have to spend time on manual testing.
- Test Data Management: Use good test data sets to perform thorough testing. Proper test data management ensures that tests are comprehensive and realistic.
Azure Artifacts
Azure Artifacts enables sharing of packages (like Maven, npm, NuGet) from public and private sources. It integrates package management into your pipelines.
Version Control: Assign version numbers to packages and libraries to track changes and dependencies effectively.
Private Feeds: Use private feeds for organization-specific artifacts to control access and maintain security.
Security Best Practices
When working in a cloud-based solution like Azure DevOps, ensuring the security of your data and infrastructure is essential. Microsoft ensures the security of underlying cloud infrastructure. However, it's your responsibility to configure security in Azure DevOps.
Here are some critical practices to follow:
User and Access Management
- Remove Inactive Users: Regularly review and remove users without access. This practice helps prevent unauthorized access.
- Use Microsoft Entra ID: Integrate with Microsoft Entra ID for centralized identity management. This integration allows for single sign-on and other security features like multi-factor authentication.
- Audit Regularly: Check and review audit logs to detect unusual activity and respond promptly to potential security incidents.
Network Security
- Encryption: Always encrypt data in transit and at rest to protect it from unauthorized access.
- Certificate Validation: Ensure that certificates are confirmed to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks.
- Web Application Firewalls (WAFs): Implement WAFs to filter, monitor, and block malicious traffic to and from Azure DevOps.
Scoped Permissions
- Minimal Access: Grant users and services only the permissions they need to perform their tasks. This principle of least privilege helps minimize the potential impact of security breaches.
- Disable Inheritance: Where possible, disable inheritance to prevent accidental or unnecessary access.
- Limit Project Access: Restrict access to sensitive projects and repositories to reduce the risk of data leaks.
Secure Service Accounts and Connections
- Restrict Privileges: Ensure service accounts have minimal privileges and zero interactive sign-in rights.
- Scoped Service Connections: Limit service connections to necessary resources to prevent over-permission.
- Workload Identity Federation: Use workload identity federation to avoid managing secrets manually, reducing the risk of exposure.
Additional Azure DevOps Best Practices
- Short Iterations
Working in short iterations (Sprints) allows teams to focus on a small set of tasks, deliver high-quality work, and continually improve based on feedback.
- Regular Reviews
Periodically review your definitions and criteria for work items based on data from completed iterations. This practice helps refine processes and improve accuracy in task completion.
- Team Retrospectives
Conduct regular retrospectives to evaluate what went well, what didn’t, and how the team can improve. These discussions foster continuous improvement and collaboration.
- Effective Sprint Planning
Define clear sprint goals, prioritize tasks, estimate efforts accurately, and create sprint backlogs. After each sprint, hold a retrospective to analyze performance and plan for the next sprint.
- Create a Wiki
A centralized knowledge base, like a wiki, improves collaboration and communication among team members. Document project architectures, procedures, and best practices to ensure everyone is on the same page.
- Implement CI/CD
Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are critical components of DevOps, emphasizing automation, collaboration, and fast feedback. Automate as many processes as possible to reduce manual errors and speed up the development cycle. Add mandatory reviews and validation steps to ensure quality and security before deploying code. Set up dashboards to track key metrics and provide the software performance as expected.
Takeaway
Adopting Azure DevOps and following best practices can significantly enhance your software development and operational efficiency. By using tools like Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Test Plans, and Azure Artifacts, you can streamline your workflows and keep robust security.
Hire DevOps Engineer to review and refine your processes. Focusing on automation and keeping security at the forefront will help you maximize the benefits of Azure DevOps. Following these best practices will enable your team to deliver better products faster and more efficiently.