Quickly setup everything you need for develop, deploy and monitor your solution on Azure – Using Azure DevOps Project

Azure DevOps Project makes it very easy to get started on Setting up code repo, build, and deployment with Azure. Just by using few quick steps, DevOps Project set you up everything you need for developing, deploying and monitoring your app on Azure. In one of my previous  article “DevOps for Bots – Rapid Development, Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) with Azure Bot Service & Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)”, I explained how we can set up a complete end-end DevOps with Azure Bot Service by enabling CI/CD pipeline from Visual Studio.

We have seen there are several other ways of enabling CI/CD pipeline and Azure DevOps Project in One of them. In this post we quickly explore how can leverage Azure DevOps Project for CI/CD pipeline setup. When we create a DevOps Project in Azure, it provisions all required Azure resources, set up Git code repository with the sample template, configure the Application Insights and set up a continuous delivery pipeline to deploy the services. It also allows you to monitor all your project related information including code commits, build, deployments from an integrated dashboard. Let’s have a look how to setup the CI/CD pipeline using Azure DevOps Project.

We will break the overall creation process down three sections

1. Project Type and Services Selection
2. Setting up Visual Studio Team Services and Azure Services
3. Monitoring using DevOps Project Dashboard

Project Type and Services Selection

As part of the first section, we will create a new Azure DevOps Project and select the required project type that we would like to develop and deploy.
From the Azure Portal, Select “Create a resource” -> “DevOps Project” and then select “Create”

From the application type selections screen, you can select a new application of the provided type and you can also choose your existing application.

 

 

In this case, we will select “.NET” application and click on Next.

Once Runtime selection is done, you need to select the version framework, and in this case, we will choose ASP.NET.

 

 

Azure DevOps Project – Select Project Type

Click on Next select the App Services for Deployment

 

 

Setting up Visual Studio Team Services and Azure Services

Once the type of projects and services are selected, we need to setup the VSTS Account. We can choose an existing VSTS account, (in this case we did that) or we can create a new one. We also need to choose Azure Subscription, App Services Name, and Plan.

 

 

 

In case you want to change the Azure Resources configuration, for an instant change the app services plan, you can click on “Change” link, which will bring an additional Azure Configuration blade.

 

 

Once this process of selection is done, click on “Done”
That’s it. It will start processing provisioning the code repository in Git, setting up build definition, release definition and everything that you need to end to end delivery.

Monitoring using DevOps Project Dashboard:

After the setup is complete, navigate to the DevOps Project Dashboard. From the dashboard, you can monitor your code repository, CI/CD pipeline, AppInsights telemetry and app services states etc.

 

The dashboard has several menu options included – Project Home Page, Repository, Build Pipeline, Release Pipeline etc. You can click on them to deep dive into specific resources, or you can click on specific resources section, for an instance, if you select the Code under repository, it will take you to VSTS Team code repository.

Click on the Build Definition option to review the build definition created by the DevOps Project.

 

Finally, if you click on Browse Link, under the Azure Resources, you will find your application is running.

 

Isn’t it very simple and easy way to getting started. Take your code repo back to Visual Studio, update your code base, do some push and check how it is reflecting through the CI/CD pipeline.

Hope this help.