Introduction

  • 1 minute

Imagine that you work as a software engineer for an online outdoor clothing retailer. You're responsible for deploying and updating the retailer's online storefront, a cloud-native, microservices-based .NET app.

To fulfill project requirements and enhance your team's agile development practices, you decide to compare continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) through GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines. CI/CD pipelines use a series of automated steps to compile and deploy apps from build through all environments.

Because the current web has a microservices architecture, and each microservice deploys independently, you start by setting up CI/CD for a single service.

The .NET web API, named the product service, supports all the backend catalog features of the website. In this module, you'll implement a CI/CD pipeline for the product service.

This module guides you through the following steps:

  • Authenticate GitHub Actions to a container registry.
  • Securely store sensitive information that GitHub Actions uses.
  • Implement an action to build the container image for a microservice.
  • Modify and commit the microservice code to trigger a build.
  • Implement an action to deploy the updated container to an Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster.
  • Modify and commit a Helm chart to trigger the deployment.
  • Revert the microservice to the previous deployment.

You use your own Azure subscription to deploy the resources in this module. If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin.

Important

To avoid unnecessary charges in your Azure subscription, be sure to delete your Azure resources when you're done with this module.

Prerequisites

  • Conceptual knowledge of DevOps practices.
  • Conceptual knowledge of containers, Docker, and AKS.
  • Access to an Azure subscription with Owner permissions.
  • Access to a GitHub account.
  • Ability to run development containers in Visual Studio Code or GitHub Codespaces, set up as described in the following section.

Development container

This module includes configuration files that define a development container, or dev container. Using a dev container ensures a standardized environment that's preconfigured with the required tools.

The dev container can run in either of two environments. Before you begin, follow the steps in one of the following links to set up your environment, including installing Docker and the necessary Visual Studio Code extensions.