Azure DevOps Server 2019:

Essentials
Conditions and Terms of Use
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Module 5: Azure Pipelines

Module Overview

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Overview
• Introduction to Azure Pipelines
• Build and Release Agents
• Builds
• Releases
• Library

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Module 5: Azure Pipelines

Lesson 1 : Introduction to Azure

Pipelines

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Overview
• What is Azure Pipelines?
• Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)
• Key Concepts
• Using Azure Pipelines

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What is Azure Pipelines?
• Agent service that you can use to automatically build and test your code project and make it available to
other users
• Works with just about any language or project type
• Fully featured continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) service
• Helps to ensure consistent and quality code that's readily available to users
• Start with your code on GitHub, Subversion, or Azure Repos. Then you can automate the build, test, and
deployment of your code to Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Amazon cloud services or on-prem

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Development Struggles

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Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)

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Key Concepts
• Agent
o When your build or deployment runs, the system begins one or more jobs. An agent is installable
software that runs one build or deployment job at a time.
• Artifact
o An artifact is a collection of files or packages published by a build. Artifacts are made available to
subsequent tasks, such as distribution or deployment.
• Build
o A build represents one execution of a pipeline. It collects the logs associated with running the steps
and the results of running tests.
• Deployment target
o A deployment target is a virtual machine, container, web app, or any service that's used to host the
application being developed. A pipeline might deploy the app to one or more deployment targets
after build is completed and tests are run.
• Job
o A build contains one or more jobs. Each job runs on an agent. A job represents an execution boundary
of a set of steps. All of the steps run together on the same agent. For example, you might build two
configurations - x86 and x64. In this case, you have one build and two jobs.
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Key Concepts (continued)
• Pipeline
o A pipeline defines the continuous integration and deployment process for your app. It's made up of
steps called tasks. It can be thought of as a script that defines how your test, build, and deployment
steps are run.
• Release
o When you use the visual designer, you create a release pipeline in addition to a build pipeline. A
release is the term used to describe one execution of a release pipeline. It's made up of deployments
to multiple stages.
• Task
o A task is the building block of a pipeline. For example, a build pipeline might consist of build tasks and
test tasks. A release pipeline consists of deployment tasks. Each task runs a specific job in the pipeline.
• Trigger
o A trigger is something that's set up to tell the pipeline when to run. You can configure a pipeline to
run upon a push to a repository, at scheduled times, or upon the completion of another build. All of
these actions are known as triggers.

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Use Azure Pipelines
• You can use either YAML or the visual designer to define your build pipelines.
• When you use YAML, you define your build pipeline mostly in code (a YAML file) alongside the rest of the
code for your app.
• When you use the visual designer, you define a build pipeline to build and test your code, and then to
publish artifacts.
• You also define a release pipeline to consume and deploy those artifacts to deployment targets.

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Use Azure Pipelines – Visual Designer
• Configure Azure Pipelines to use your Git repo.
• Use the Azure Pipelines visual designer to create and configure your build and release pipelines.
• Push your code to your version control repository. This action triggers your pipeline and runs tasks such as
building or testing code.
• The build creates an artifact that's used by the rest of your pipeline to run tasks such as deploying to
staging or production.
• Your code is now updated, built, tested, and packaged. It can be deployed to any target.

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Use Azure Pipelines – Visual Designer (continued)
• The visual designer is great for users who are new to the world of continuous integration (CI) and
continuous delivery (CD)
• The visual representation of the pipelines makes it easier to get started
• Located in the same hub as the build results. This location makes it easier to switch back and forth and
make changes

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Use Azure Pipelines - YAML
• Configure Azure Pipelines to use your Git repo.
• Edit your azure-pipelines.yml file to define your build.
• Push your code to your version control repository. This action kicks off the default trigger to build and
deploy and then monitor the results.
• Your code is now updated, built, tested, and packaged. It can be deployed to any target.

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Use Azure Pipelines – YAML (continued)
• The pipeline is versioned with your code and follows the same branching structure
• Validate your changes through code reviews in pull requests and branch build policies
• Every branch you use can modify the build policy by modifying the azure-pipelines.yml file.
• A change to the build process might cause a break or result in an unexpected outcome. Because the
change is in version control with the rest of your codebase, you can more easily identify the issue.
• Web editor with IntelliSense available for YAML pipelines
• Task assistant available for editing YAML files
• Trigger YAML pipelines with tags

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. What is Azure Pipelines?
2. What value does Continuous Integration provide?
3. Name the two options available to define Azure Pipelines.

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Lesson Summary
• In this lesson, you learned about:
o Azure Pipelines
o Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
o Using Azure Pipelines

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Module 5: Azure Pipelines

Lesson 2: Build and Release

Agents

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Overview
• Agents
• Capabilities
• Communication

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Agents
• To build your code or deploy your software you need at least one agent. As you add more code and
people, you'll eventually need more.

• When your build or deployment runs, the system begins one or more jobs. An agent is installable software
that runs one build or deployment job at a time.

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Agent Pools
• An agent pool defines the sharing boundary for all agents in that pool
• Organize agents into agent pools
• Scoped to the Azure DevOps Server 2019 installation; so you can share an agent pool across
collections/projects.
• A project agent pool provides access to an organization agent pool. When you create a build or release
pipeline, you specify which pool it uses. Pools are scoped to your project in TFS 2017 and newer and in
Azure Pipelines, so you can only use them across build and release pipelines within a project.
• To share an agent pool with multiple projects, in each of those projects, you create a project agent pool
pointing to an organization agent pool.
• While multiple pools across projects can use the same organization agent pool, multiple pools within a
project cannot use the same organization agent pool.
• Also, each project agent pool can use only one organization agent pool.

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Agents
• Self-hosted
o Set up and manage on your own to run build and deployment jobs
o Gives you more control to install dependent software needed for your builds and deployments
o You can install the agent on Linux, macOS, or Windows machines. You can also install an agent on a Linux Docker
container.
o Can be configured as a service or an interactive process

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Capabilities
• Every agent has a set of capabilities that indicate what it can do
• Capabilities are name-value pairs either automatically discovered by the agent software (system
capabilities), or those that you define (user capabilities)
• The agent software automatically determines various system capabilities:
o Name of the machine, type of operating system, and versions of certain software installed on the machine
o Environment variables defined in the machine

• You can specify certain demands of the agent when you author a build or release pipeline or queue a build
or deployment
o The system sends the job only to agents that have capabilities matching the demands specified in the pipeline
o Allows you to direct builds and deployments to specific agents

• View the system capabilities of an agent, and manage its user capabilities by navigating to Agent pools
and selecting the Capabilities tab for the desired agent

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Communication
• Agents communicate with Azure Pipelines to determine which job it needs to run, and to report the logs
and job status
• Communication is always initiated by the agent (HTTP/HTTPS)

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. What are the two types of agents?
2. How does an agent communicate with Azure Pipelines?

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Demo 1: Install an agent

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Lesson Summary
• In this lesson, you learned about:
o Agents
o Capabilities
o Communication

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Module 5: Azure Pipelines

Lesson 3: Builds

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Overview
• Features
• Build Pipelines

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Build for Your Platform, Speaking Your Language
• One system for multiple platforms
• Build for most platforms:
• Windows
• iOS
• Java (Ant, Maven, or Gradle)
• Linux

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Extensible Cross-Platform Task and Build Engine

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Run Unit Tests and Publish Results
Run unit tests for just about any framework:
• NUnit
• MSTest
• JUnit
Publish test results to, and include them in, the build summary

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Features
• Real-time Build Status
o A live console view on the web that displays the real-time status of each task

• Auditing and Diff

o Build definition is in JSON
o You can identify who changed what in a build pipeline

• Variables
o Common parameter values can be abstracted into variables
o Sensitive values can be marked as secret

• CI Support
o Branch filter

• Template
o Reuse pre-defined steps

• Task-based
o Execute any script
o Extensible

• YAML support
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What is a Build Pipeline?
• Defines the configuration for a concrete application build process
• Key settings:
o Name
o Triggers
o Repository mappings
o Build defaults
o Retention policy

• Process settings:
o Tasks
 Building block for defining automation in a build pipeline
 A packaged script or procedure that has been abstracted with a set of inputs
 Every task has its own arguments
 Tasks are run in sequence, one after the other, on an agent
 To run the same set of tasks in parallel on multiple agents, or to run some tasks without using an agent, use jobs

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Build Templates
• Use a template with pre-defined steps to simplify the effort
• Or create your build pipeline from scratch
• Or create your own template from an existing build pipeline

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Build Triggers
Multiple triggers per build:
• Manual
• Continuous integration
o Batch changes
o Path filters

• Scheduled
• TFVC Gated check-in
• Pull request validation
o Add as many triggers as you wish

• Build completion
o Trigger a new build when a upstream dependency change

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Repository Settings
• Select the type of source repository that contains your source files and specify where your sources are
• Repository type:
o Azure Repos Git or TFVC
o GitHub
o GitHub Enterprise
o External Git
o Subversion

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Variables
• Variables give you a convenient way to get key bits of data into various parts of your build pipeline
• There is a list of predefined build variables
• Predefined build variables give you information about the build setup and environment configuration
during execution.
o EG: working folder, build definition name, source folder being built.

• These variables are automatically set by the system and are read-only.
• Examples of predefined variables:
o Build.DefinitionName
o Build.SourcesDirectory
o Build.StagingDirectory

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Build Configuration Options
• Build number format
• Badge enabled
• Enable/Pause/Disable
• Build job authorization scope
• Demands

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Retention Policy
• Configure how long builds are to be retained by the system
• Conserve storage and reduce clutter

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History
• List of changes that includes who made the change and when the change occurred
• Compare two different versions
• Revert to a specific version

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Export/Import
• Export build pipeline as a JSON file
• Import and reuse in another Project

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Queue a Build
• Web-browser based
• Settings:
o Agent pool
o Branch
o Commit
o Variables/Demands

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View Logs
• Real-time monitoring and logging
• Click on a task to view task specific log
• Logs are saved with the build after completion

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. What is a Build Pipeline?
2. Name two types of Build triggers.
3. Where would you store the script that you want to execute during Build?

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Demo 2: Builds

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Lesson Summary
• In this lesson, you learned about:
o Build Features
o Build Pipelines

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Module 5: Azure Pipelines

Lesson 4: Releases

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Overview
• Release Pipelines
• How Do Release Pipelines Work?
• Artifacts
• Stages
• Triggers
• Variables
• Approvals and Gates
• Retention Policy
• Deployment Groups
• Releases and Deployments
• Creating a Release
• Tracking a Release

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Release Pipelines
• Release pipelines in Azure Pipelines are an essential element of DevOps CI/CD that help your team
continuously deliver software to your customers at a faster pace and with lower risk.
• You can fully automate the testing and delivery of your software in multiple stages all the way to
production, or set up semi-automated processes with approvals and on-demand deployments.

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Release Pipelines (continued)
Consider using release pipelines if:
• You develop applications and need to deploy them regularly to any platform, public or private cloud
services, or App stores.
• You use a continuous integration (CI) system and are looking for a fully-fledged continuous delivery
management or release system.
• You need to track the progress of releases
• You need control of the deployments
• You need audit history for all releases and their deployments

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Release Pipelines (continued)
• A release pipeline defines the end-to-end release pipeline for an application to be deployed across
various stages
• Use Azure Pipelines releases by authoring a release pipeline for your application
• Specify the artifacts that make up the application and the release pipeline
• An artifact is a deployable component of your application. It is typically produced through a Continuous
Integration or a build pipeline. Azure Pipelines releases can deploy artifacts that are produced by a wide
range of artifact sources such as Azure Pipelines build, Jenkins, or Team City
• Define the release pipeline using stages, and restrict deployments into or out of an stage using
approvals
• Define the automation in each stage using jobs and tasks
• Use variables to generalize your automation and triggers to control when the deployments should be
kicked off automatically

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Release Pipelines (continued)

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How Do Release Pipelines Work?

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 Artifacts
• A release is a collection of artifacts.
• An artifact is a deployable component of your application
• Link the appropriate artifact sources to your release pipeline.
• A release pipeline can be linked to multiple artifact sources.
• You specify which version of the artifact to deploy when a release is created.
• Artifact sources:
o Azure Pipelines
o TFVC, Git, and GitHub
o Jenkins
o Azure Container Registry, Docker, and Kubernetes
o Azure Artifacts (NuGet, Maven, and npm)
o External or on-premises TFS
o TeamCity
o Other sources

• Can link to a continuous deployment trigger

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 Stages
• A stage is a logical and independent entity that represents where you want to deploy a release
• The deployment in a stage may be to a collection of servers, a cloud, or multiple clouds
• Deploy to a stage independently of other stages in the pipeline
• The deployment pipeline of a release to a stage is defined in terms of jobs and tasks
• The physical deployment of a release to a stage is controlled through
approvals and gates, deployment conditions and triggers, and queuing policies

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Stages - Jobs
• Organize your deployment pipeline into jobs. Every deployment pipeline has at least one job
• A job is a series of tasks that run sequentially on the same target
• At design time in your job, you specify a series of tasks that you want to run on a common target.
• At run time (when the release pipeline is triggered), each job is dispatched as one or more jobs to its target
• In a deployment pipeline, the target can be either an agent, a deployment group, or the server
• When the target is an agent, the tasks are run on the computer that hosts the agent

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 Stages – Tasks
• A task is the building block for defining automation in a stage of a release pipeline
• Packaged script or procedure that has been abstracted with a set of inputs
• All the tasks are run in sequence, one after the other, on an agent

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Stages – Queuing Policies

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Stages - General

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 Triggers
• Configure when releases should be created (release triggers), and when those releases should be
deployed to stages (stage triggers), in your DevOps CI/CD processes

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Triggers – Release Triggers
• Continuous deployment triggers
o Azure Pipelines creates new releases automatically when it detects new artifacts are available
o At present only available for Team Foundation Build artifacts and Git-based sources such as Team Foundation Git,
GitHub, and other Git repositories
• Scheduled release triggers
o Create and start a release at specific times

• Pull request triggers

o Configure a pull request trigger that will create a new release when a pull request uploads a new version of the
artifact

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Triggers – Stage Triggers
Trigger deployment to each stage automatically when a release is created by a continuous deployment
trigger, based on:
• The result of deploying to a previous stage in the pipeline
• Filters based on the artifacts
• A predefined schedule
• A pull request that updates the artifacts
• The pull request trigger conditions settings
• Manually by a user

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 Variables
• Custom variables: Define a more generic deployment pipeline once, and then customize it easily for each
stage
o Share values across all of the definitions in a project by using variable groups
o Share values across all of the stages by using release pipeline variables
o Avoid duplication of values, making it easier to update all occurrences as one operation
o Store sensitive values in a way that they cannot be seen or changed by users of the release pipelines

• Default variables: Use information about the context of the particular release, stage, artifacts, or agent in
which the deployment pipeline is being run

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Approvals and Gates
• Approvals and gates give you additional control over the start and completion of the deployment pipeline
• Configure each stage in a release pipeline with pre- and post-deployment conditions that can include
waiting for users to manually approve or reject deployments, and checking with other automated systems
until specific conditions are verified
• Configure a manual intervention to pause the deployment pipeline and prompt users to carry out manual
tasks, then resume or reject the deployment

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Approvals and Gates (continued)

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 Retention Policy
• Control how long a release is retained for each pipeline

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Deployment Groups
• A deployment group is a logical set of deployment target machines that have agents installed on each one.
• Deployment groups represent the physical environments; for example, "Dev", "Test", "UAT", and
"Production". In effect, a deployment group is just another grouping of agents, much like an agent pool
• When authoring an Azure Pipelines Release pipeline, you can specify the deployment targets for a job
using a deployment group. This makes it easy to define parallel execution of deployment tasks
• Deployment groups:
o Specify the security context and runtime targets for the agents.
o As you create a deployment group, you add users and give them appropriate permissions to administer, manage,
view, and use the group.
o Let you view live logs for each server as a deployment takes place, and download logs for all servers to track your
deployments down to individual machines.
o Enable you to use machine tags to limit deployment to specific sets of target servers.

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Releases and Deployments
• A release is the package or container that holds a versioned set of artifacts specified in a release pipeline
in your DevOps CI/CD processes..
• A deployment is the action of running the tasks for one stage, which results in the application artifacts
being deployed, tests being run, and whatever other actions are specified for that stage.

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Creating a Release
Releases (and, in some cases, draft releases) can be created:
• By a continuous deployment trigger that creates a release when a new version of the source build artifacts
is available
• By using the Release command in the UI to create a release manually from the Releases or the Builds
summary
• By sending a command over the network to the REST interface

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Tracking a Release
• The Releases page shows a list of releases
• Click on a specific release to see the release log and details.
o See the status for each stage.

• Click on a stage to view the details of that stage

o Logs, test
o Can deploy a stage if previously failed.

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. What is a Release Pipeline?
2. What is an Artifact?
3. Name two release triggers
4. How would you create a release?
5. True/False: You can create a release from a build

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Demo 3: Creating a Release
Pipeline

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Lesson Summary
• In this lesson, you learned about:
o Release Pipelines
o How Release Pipelines Work
o Artifacts
o Stages
o Triggers
o Variables
o Approvals and Gates
o Retention Policy
o Deployment Groups
o Releases and Deployments
o Creating a Release
o Tracking a Release

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Module 5: Azure Pipelines

Lesson 5: Library

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Overview
• Library
• Variable Groups
• Task Groups
• Service Connections
• Secure Files

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Library
• Collection of shared build and release assets for a project
• Assets defined in a library can be used in multiple build and release pipelines of the project
• Can be accessed directly in Azure Pipelines
• Contains two types of assets: variable groups and secure files
• Security:
o Control who can define new items in a library, and who can use an existing item
o Roles are defined for library items, and membership of these roles governs the operations you can perform on
those items

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Variable Groups
• Use a variable group to store values that you want to make available across multiple build and release
pipelines
• Variable groups are defined and managed in the Library tab of the Pipelines hub

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Task Groups
• Standardize and centrally manage deployment steps for all your applications
• Allow you to encapsulate a sequence of tasks, already defined in a build or a release pipeline, into a single
reusable task that can be added to a build or release pipeline, just like any other task
• Automatically added to the task catalog, ready to be added to other release and build pipelines
• Stored at the project level, and are not accessible outside the project scope

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Service Connections
• Connect to external and remote services to execute tasks for a build or deployment by defining service
connections in Azure Pipelines
• Define and manage service connections from the Admin settings of your project:
o https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/{project}/_admin/_services

• Created at project scope. A service connection created in one project is not visible in another project.

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Secure Files
• Use the Secure Files library to store files such as signing certificates, Apple Provisioning Profiles, Android
Keystore files, and SSH keys on the server without having to commit them to your source repository
• Defined and managed in the Library tab in Azure Pipelines
• The contents of the secure files are encrypted and can only be used during the build or release pipeline by
referencing them from a task
• Available across multiple build and release pipelines in the project based on the security settings
• Secure files follow the library security model
• There's a size limit of 10 MB for each secure file

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Lesson Knowledge Check
1. Why would you use a variable group?
2. True/False: There's a size limit of 10 MB for each secure file

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Demo 5: Library

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Lesson Summary
• In this lesson, you learned about:
o Library
o Variable Groups
o Task Groups
o Service Connections
o Secure Files

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Module Summary
• In this module, you learned about:
o Azure Pipelines
o Build and Release Agents
o Builds
o Releases
o Library

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Lab: Azure Pipelines

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