DevOps Practices for Azure Infrastructure - Continuous Integration

The generally adopted definition of DevOps methodology says that it's a combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver solutions. That's very broad. So broad, that initial adoption in the case of many organizations has focused on applying it only to application code. This has led to the naming of several additional methodologies to either further blend DevOps with additional areas or focus on previously neglected aspects: DevSecOps, FinOps, DataOps, GitOps, or MLOps. But, regardless of the flavor, the core remains the same. This is why, although I'm writing about DevOps in the context of infrastructure, I have avoided using GitOps in the title.

If you look for a definition of GitOps, you may find statements like "GitOps is a process of automating IT infrastructure using infrastructure as code and software development best practices" or "GitOps is a subset of DevOps". In reality, the term has been strongly tied to a specific ecosystem and specific tools. I don't want to fight with those associations. Instead, I want to focus on the essence - applying DevOps practices to infrastructure.

DevOps Practices

DevOps practices are a way to bring DevOps cultural philosophies (collaboration, automation, continuous feedback, continuous improvement, etc.) to life. They are used to implement all the stages of the DevOps pipeline:

You may find slightly different lists of those practices, this is the one I prefer:

• Continuous Planning
• Continuous Integration
• Continuous Delivery
• Continuous Deployme