Harnessing a hybrid cloud strategy offers flexibility and control, but it also complicates development and operations. Azure DevOps simplifies these challenges, providing a robust platform specifically designed for managing complex hybrid cloud environments.
Azure DevOps is a powerful tool for any enterprise using a hybrid cloud model, not just those fully committed to Microsoft Azure. Here’s why it is so valuable:
Unified Project Management Across Environments
A major challenge in hybrid cloud environments is keeping all project planning and tracking in one place. Azure DevOps services tackle this by:
Azure Boards: It offers a central hub for managing all your work, regardless of whether it involves on-premises applications, cloud-native services, or hybrid components. This provides a consistent way to track features, user stories, bugs, and tasks, ensuring alignment and transparency across your distributed teams.
Dashboards and Reporting: Create custom dashboards to consolidate progress data from various projects and teams across your hybrid estate. This enhances decision-making and resource allocation, ensuring both on-premises and cloud initiatives stay on track.
Seamless CI/CD Pipelines for Diverse Deployments
Automating your build, test, and deployment processes is crucial for efficient hybrid cloud operations, and Azure DevOps Pipelines are excellent at it.
Multi-Platform Agent Support: Azure DevOps agents can be deployed anywhere – on-premises, in your private cloud, or directly within Azure. This flexibility lets you build and deploy applications to diverse environments using a single pipeline.
Flexible Deployment Targets: Azure DevOps Services supports diverse deployment targets, from on-premises Kubernetes or virtual machines to Azure App Service or other cloud providers, with a rich set of built-in tasks and extensions. You can also configure deployment groups for consistent, automated releases to your on-premises servers.
Environment-Specific Configurations: Azure pipelines securely manage environment-specific variables and secrets, crucial for hybrid deployments where configurations vary between on-premises and cloud environments. Variables defined at the environment level ensure automatic application of correct configurations during deployment.
Release Gates and Approvals: Implement strong approval processes for deployments to sensitive on-premises or cloud environments. This ensures necessary reviews and approvals by stakeholders before production, enhancing control and reducing risk.
Integrated Source Control and Artifact Management
Azure DevOps streamlines version control and artifact management in a hybrid environment.
Azure Repos (Git and TFVC): Azure Repos centralizes all your code, whether for on-premises legacy systems or new cloud applications, providing a single source of truth. This streamlines collaboration and prevents divergence.
Azure Artifacts: Centralize package management with Azure Artifacts. It ensures consistent consumption and publishing of packages for both on-premises and cloud projects, eliminating separate repositories and simplifying dependency management across your hybrid environment.
Comprehensive Testing and Quality Assurance
It is crucial to guarantee the caliber of applications in a hybrid setting. Azure DevOps offers the following tools:
Azure Test Plans: Azure Test Plans provides a unified interface to plan, execute, and track all manual and automated testing activities. This ensures comprehensive test coverage for applications spanning both on-premises and cloud components.
Integration with Test Automation Frameworks: Integrate popular test automation frameworks into your Azure pipelines effortlessly. This enables consistent quality gates by running automated tests against applications, irrespective of their deployment location.
Enhanced Security and Compliance
Security and Compliance are paramount in any environment, especially hybrid ones. Azure DevOps helps strengthen these by:
Role-Based Access Control: Maintain security across your on-premises and cloud infrastructure with granular access control.
Secure Secret Management: Integrate with Azure Key Vault to securely store and retrieve secrets, credentials, and certificates.
Audit Trails: Azure DevOps maintains detailed audit trails of all activities, providing a clear record of user actions and timestamps.
How Canarys can shape the strategic imperative for your Company?
By centralizing your development and operations workflows, Azure DevOps helps teams deliver value faster, more reliably, and more securely, no matter where their applications are located. Our certified and experienced team of professionals will help you to achieve this feat.