Describe Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines is a cloud service that automatically builds and tests your code project and makes it available to other users. It works with just about any language or project type.
Azure Pipelines combines continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to test and build your code and ship it to any target constantly and consistently.
Does Azure Pipelines work with my language and tools?
Azure Pipelines is a fully featured cross-platform CI and CD service. It works with your preferred Git provider and can deploy to most major cloud services, including Azure services.
Languages
You can use many languages with Azure Pipelines, such as Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C#, and Go.
Version control systems
Before you use continuous integration and continuous delivery practices for your applications, you must have your source code in a version control system. Azure Pipelines integrates with GitHub, GitLab, Azure Repos, Bitbucket, and Subversion.
Application types
You can use Azure Pipelines with most application types, such as Java, JavaScript, Python, .NET, PHP, Go, XCode, and C++.
Deployment targets
Use Azure Pipelines to deploy your code to multiple targets. Targets including:
- Container registries.
- Virtual machines.
- Azure services, or any on-premises or cloud target such:
- Microsoft Azure.
- Google Cloud.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Package formats
To produce packages that others can consume, you can publish NuGet, npm, or Maven packages to the built-in package management repository in Azure Pipelines.
You also can use any other package management repository of your choice.
Why should I use CI and CD, and Azure Pipelines?
Implementing CI and CD pipelines help to ensure consistent and quality code that's readily available to users.
Azure Pipelines is a quick, easy, and safe way to automate building your projects and making them available to users.
Use CI and CD for your project
Continuous integration is used to automate tests and builds for your project. CI helps to catch bugs or issues early in the development cycle when they're easier and faster to fix. Items known as artifacts are produced from CI systems. The continuous delivery release pipelines use them to drive automatic deployments.
Continuous delivery is used to automatically deploy and test code in multiple stages to help drive quality. Continuous integration systems produce deployable artifacts, which include infrastructure and apps. Automated release pipelines consume these artifacts to release new versions and fixes to the target of your choice.
| Continuous integration (CI) | Continuous delivery (CD) |
|---|---|
| Increase code coverage. | Automatically deploy code to production. |
| Build faster by splitting test and build runs. | Ensure deployment targets have the latest code. |
| Automatically ensure you don't ship broken code. | Use tested code from the CI process. |
| Run tests continually. |
Use Azure Pipelines for CI and CD
There are several reasons to use Azure Pipelines for your CI and CD solution. You can use it to:
- Work with any language or platform.
- Deploy to different types of targets at the same time.
- Integrate with Azure deployments.
- Build on Windows, Linux, or macOS machines.
- Integrate with GitHub.
- Work with open-source projects.