hello guys it's adam and in this episode we'll be focusing on what is devops and which services in azure help us build devops solutions stay tuned as part of the episode 18 we'll learn about two services those services are azure devops and azure devtest labs generally speaking devops is a set of practices that combine both development and operations and the goal here is to shorten the development lifecycle by providing customers with set of tools for continuous integration and continuous delivery of their software so called ci cd and ensuring high quality of their deliverables so in
short deliver faster while ensuring high quality and the first service that helps us with doing that is azure devops in order to understand this service better let's talk about the key features that this service delivers and the first one is called boards this feature allows customers to track their work track the progress across the team members but also manage all the deliverables all the work status all the features and user stories for the project in a single place additionally with azure devops you have repos repos allow you to manage code repositories and code versioning for
your project and their deliverables and with pipelines you can create automated builds and automated deployment processes for your code and your application across multiple environments and with other artifacts you can create hosts share packages with your team you can also add the artifacts that you created to your ci cd pipelines with a single click etc etc and lastly we have azure test plans which allows us to track our testing progress with manual and exploratory testing tools and all of those features are combined into azure devops and if that wasn't enough if there are any features
missing there's always marketplace with over a thousand available additions to azure devops so you can extend the basic functionalities and customize everything to your needs in summary azure devops is a collection of services that help customers build solutions with use of devops practices and they do that by providing you with set of services services like boards for tracking and managing your work on the project pipelines to build your ci cd workflows repos to manage and collaborate on your code has plans to manage your tests and exploratory testing or manual testing and artifacts to manage all
the project deliverables and if there's anything missing just go to marketplace and extend the functionalities of azure devops one thing to note here is that devops originally was called tfs team foundation server on premises then moved to the cloud where it was called vsts visual studio team services and now it's called azure devops therefore if you have been working with any of those technologies in the past azure devops will feel very familiar to you and the second service is called azure dev test labs this service is a little bit similar to azure machine learning service
that we learned in the past because it's all about providing a workspace for the users within azure so users connect to dev test labs and they are able to provision virtual machines and in the simple terms this is what this service is all about users like developers and testers coming to azure dev test labs where they create virtual machines by choosing what kind of image they choose for their operating system the base image then they additionally install some artifacts like visual studio or maybe 7-zip or git and they can do this configuration for every single
vm that they create and you can choose any kind of artifacts they want and any kind of operating systems the goal here is very simple dev test labs aims to provide users with the ability to create virtual machines at will so they can very quickly test things develop things and destroy them as soon as they don't need it and they provide it within a single concise workspace in azure but in order to control the cost and control your organizational resources admins can come to azure dev test labs and provide set of policies like which operating
system images can be used what kind of sizes of virtual machines are available what kind of quotas each user has so how many virtual machines can each user provision of course all of this is to be cost effective while still providing great flexibility for developers and testers let me show you how this works inside of the azure portal i can go to the resource group that i created previously for the dev test lab resource in here i will find a resource that represents my workspace and when i open this i will see all the available
options for me to manage my lab environment in here i can find one virtual machine that i created beforehand called win10 which is windows 10 virtual machine with the current version the status of the virtual machine is stopped the allocated that means i'm not paying for any resources in here i currently don't have any auto start policies but i have one auto shutdown that means if i forget to turn this virtual machine off it will automatically stop running every day at midnight and you can configure this policy on your own if you want so let
me show you how easy it is to create new lab environment we can simply press on the add button at the top and choose from the base image that will be our starting point for the virtual machine in here i will type windows 10 because i want windows 10 virtual machine and i can choose from one of the many options available let's say windows 10 professional some of the fields will fill automatically but you can change the name if you want so instead of adam001 i can append az900 if i want to i can change
the default username or leave it as adam i can also change the default password and provide the one that i want on my own and if you want you can select this as a default password for all the future virtual machines that you will be creating if you want you can change the size of the virtual machine and operating system this type but the most important here is the artifacts section which allows you to install additional tools for example i like to add 7-zip to work on some archives i can just select it and hit
add and if i know i'll be writing some code i can type visual studio to find the visual studio options like the enterprise or professional or visual studio code and then add that as well and lastly we can check for all the tools like pipelines agents for our azure devops we can maybe install some additional modules for our powershells or we can scroll down and install git if we want to work with our code versioning and just add it and if we are happy with our selection we don't want to add anything else we click
on ok and then review our virtual machine setup if we're happy with that as well again hit create now the creation starts and depending on the size of the virtual machine operating systems and the amount of the tools that we selected this will take from 15 minutes to even couple of hours in this case my selection took about half an hour to provision and to get virtual machine to the running state and once the virtual machine is running we can click on it to review the details of currently provisioned lab we can either connect to
us or check the schedule so auto start and auto shutdown options we can also do some extra operations on this virtual machine like create a formula a reusable template for other team members to start from or simply we can connect to this virtual machine by hitting on the connect button this will download a new remote desktop connection file we've already provided the user name and the address for our remote server so we can use that file to connect to the server by providing the password that we use during the creation after that just hit ok
accept the certificate that will pop up and just wait for the connection to be established for the first time this takes about one or two minutes and as you can see on the screen this is a windows 10 based virtual machine because this is the image that we chose during the creation time additionally on the desktop you can notice visual studio code installed so you're ready to start your development operations and testing processes or really whatever you need and that's pretty much as simple as it goes when it comes to creating new devtest labs and
when you're done you can close the connection and stop the virtual machine or let auto shutdown turn it off later on during the day to summarize azure dev test labs is a service within azure that allows developers and testers to provision and manage their sandbox environments for testing and development purposes and it does it by providing with the ability to create self-managed virtual machines very quickly and very effectively with some pre-configured templates or additional artifacts like tools applications or even custom actions created by your organization additionally you have lab policies which allow you to control
the cost for your environments by applying some quotas sizes auto shutdown policies and many others you can also share your existing labs and automate everything using custom images and with some pre-made plugins apis and tools you can automate everything using ci cd pipelines with tools like azure devops so you can get more effective as your organization grows in size so let me summarize all the devops services that we've learned about in this episode first of all we have azure devops which is our end-to-end platform for building ci cd pipelines managing our code and code versioning
tracking and managing the work and all the project deliverables and additionally we've learned about azure devtest labs which is a concise workspace where developers and testers create cloud-based environments for testing and development purposes with some cool stuff like reusable templates cost management policies and multiple integrations all the materials for this episode you can find under episode 18 on my website we're done with devops but next on our list are tools that help us manage azure resources make sure not to miss this episode out hit on the icon on the side or follow the playlist to
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