With Azure Pipelines your company can integrate CI/CD practices. But what is CI/CD? CI is the abbreviation for Continuous integration. This is the principle that developers merge their feature changes (via feature branches) into a master or development branch multiple times a day. The next step in the CI process is to compile the code on a build server with each merge. In Azure DevOps, developers use pull requests to merge their changes into the development branch. When a pull request is completed, an Azure Pipeline will start an automated build and often run automated tests.
Some companies prefer to have the CI pipeline just build the application to see that the code still builds after a merge, without running tests. The tests run on another Pipeline which is scheduled in the evening.
So in a typical development process, features are developed on a local machine, in a local feature branch. Developers create and run unit tests for their changes locally. After that, the developer pushes the changes into the remote repository and creates a pull request. After completion, the CI build pipelines starts a build, runs automated tests, both unit and integration tests, and deliver statistics on the test process. The end result for Business Central projects is an .app file. This is called an artifact.
The CD part in CI/CD of the acronym is continuous delivery or continuous deployment. Let's start with continuous delivery, which makes sure that software can be released at any time, but using a manual release process. In Azure DevOps, this would be a release pipeline, which is an easy to use and repeatable deployment process.
Continuous deployment even takes it a bit further, where you set up an automated deployment process. After some pre-requirements are met, the release pipeline automatically deploys the latest version, without manual interaction. CI/CD is fully supported with Azure Pipelines and can be applied and used with Business Central.
vmware vsphere certification training courses malaysia
