This blog post covers a brief overview of the topics covered and some common questions asked during Day 1 Live Interactive training on Azure DevOps Engineer Certification [AZ-400].
During our Day 1 Live Session, we covered DevOps, Components that form DevOps, Horizontal & Vertical Teams, DevOps Work Items, Azure Boards, and performed hands-on lab, where we have looked at Azure DevOps features.
DevOps
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: DevOps evolved from traditional Development and Operations infrastructure management processes. DevOps enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market.
DevOps as a Job Role
DevOps professionals combine people, processes, and technologies to continuously deliver valuable products and services that meet end-user needs and business objectives.
Azure DevOps professionals must be able to design and implement DevOps practices for version control, compliance, infrastructure as code, configuration management, build, release, and testing by using Azure technologies.
Tasks performed by DevOps Engineer:
- Plan & Build: In the context of software development, build refers to the process that converts files and other assets under the developer’s responsibility into a software product in its final or consumable form. The build may include compiling source files. This might consist of building an image into a container and saving it to an image repository.
- Test: This is the strongest area where DevOps experience and expertise can be seen. Automation and testing go hand in hand and hence strong testing skills are essential for successful DevOps engineers. Testing ensures that there is no breakdown and the application is working as intended. From the initial stages of the development till deployment tests are automated to ensure that the application is intact.
- Continuous Integration: Continuous Integration is a software development practise where developers regularly merge their code changes into a central repository, after which automated builds and tests are run. The critical goals of Continuous Integration are to find and address bugs quicker, improve software quality, and reduce the time it takes to validate and release new software updates.
- Continuous Delivery: Continuous Delivery is a software development practice where code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a production release. It expands upon Continuous Integration by deploying all code changes to a testing environment or a production environment after the build stage. When Continuous Delivery is implemented properly, developers will always have a deployment-ready build artifact that has passed through a standardized test process.
Know more about the Roles and Responsibilities of a DevOps Engineer here.
Components that form DevOps
- Stakeholder: A stakeholder is a customer who asks for requirements. They can be teams within an organization such as sales or technical teams or they can from outside the organization who is asking for certain solutions.
- Organization: Organization that works with the stakeholder to understand their requirement and create documentation of tools, features or products that are requested by the stakeholder. The organization coordinates with stakeholders to prepare Design documents for DevOps teams.
- Design Document: This document is created by the organization serving the Stakeholder and it contains the details of requirements and features of the stakeholder. This document also specifies the solution that has to be built.
- Planning: This is the planning phase of DevOps. Here teams plan the technology stack for the solution that has to be built. The following are taken into consideration during the planning phase
- Technical stack of the Project
- Teams who will build the solution
- Deadlines & Iterations
- Who is going to work on each module?
- How to track status for the project
So far, we have covered the planning phase of DevOps. Now let’s look into the type of teams that form a DevOps organization.
Types of Teams in DevOps Organizations
Vertical Team: A Vertical Team is one where the leader of the team (usually the manager) is responsible for setting the direction, priorities, and goals for the team. The team may create a Vision and set of Success Factors based on the primary goals for the team, but once the team has to operationalize those goals, it is up to the leader to establish priorities and to resolve conflicting agendas between the team players and their functions.
Horizontal Team: On a Horizontal Team, the team leader is still responsible for setting the direction of the team; however, the entire team is involved in translating the direction into an agreed-upon set of priorities. The team identifies the most important priorities that it is accountable for, based on the direction of the organization, the specific needs of its primary customers, and the specific goals directed by upper levels of management.
The team, as a group, is also involved in strategizing a process for accomplishing those priorities, and in evaluating the specific roles, relationships, and functions needed to achieve their goals.
Types of DevOps Projects
Brownfield Project: Brownfield software development refers to the development and deployment of a new software system in the presence of existing or legacy software systems. Brownfield development usually happens when you want to develop or improve upon an existing application, and compels you to work with previously created code.
Greenfield Project: Greenfield project means developing a brand new software application, where we get to choose the architecture, the platform, and all other technologies. We start from the ground up with the discovery and scoping process and help to strategize the appropriate technologies and design aspects.
Know more about DevOps Projects here.
Azure DevOps Work Items
- Epic: Epic is a body of work that can be broken down into specific tasks (called user stories) based on the needs/requests of customers or end-users. Epics are an important practice for agile and DevOps teams. When adopting agile and DevOps, an epic serves to manage tasks.
- Story: Stories are used as the basis for estimating, planning, and whether the value was delivered to customers. A key DevOps strategy is bringing small increments through into productive use, which exposes process issues that need tuning
- Features: This defines a set of requirements for a specific part of the project
- Backlogs: A product backlog is a prioritized list of deliverables (such as new features) that should be implemented as part of a project or product development. It’s a decision-making artifact that helps you estimate, refine, and prioritize everything you might sometime in the future want to complete.
- Tasks: Here tasks are assigned to team members. This process enables easy tracking of the project status.
Know more about Work Items here
What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is a cloud platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. It also integrates with most leading tools on the market and is a great option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain.
Know more about Azure DevOps here
Azure Boards?
Azure Boards is an interface or a service of DevOps through which teams can manage their projects throughout the entire development lifecycle. It allows the team to track their tasks, work status, user stories, backlogs, features, and track bugs and defects that are noticed in the project.
The three basic work items are Epics, Issues, and Task. Read more on Azure DevOps Services. Some features of Azure boards include:
- Scalability: The system scales as the organization and team grows – this is critical to ensure we can measure and manage the work regardless of the organization or project size.
- Interactive/Visual tools and easy to customize: Work progress can be easily monitored and customize boards, using common configurable dialogue.
- Built-in Tools and capture information: Items are designed to help in Editing, adding images, and attachments can be done on these work items.
- Extensions: You can achieve more functionality by adding a Marketplace extension. Extensions are installable units that add enhancements to the already existing tools.
- Integration with GitHub: It is easy to connect to GitHub and you can perform pull, push, and commit requests easily.
Source: Microsoft
Why Organizations choose DevOps?
- Automation − Automate everything, such as workflows, testing new code, and how your infrastructure is provisioned.
- Iteration − Write small chunks of code during a time-box sprint to support releases and sub-releases that increase the speed and frequency of deployments.
- Continuous Improvement − Continuously test, learn from failures, and act on feedback to optimize performance, cost, and time to deployment.
- Collaboration − Unite teams, foster communication, and break down silos between development, IT operations, and quality assurance.
FAQ’s asked in the session are:
These are some questions that were asked during the AZ-400 day 1 live session. These questions are from modules 1 & 2.
Q1: Does a DevOps engineer need to know SQL coding in detail?
A: No it’s not required. As a DevOps Engineer, you can work on the domain in which you specialize, whether you are a System Admin or you are good at SQL Coding, you can use that knowledge in DevOps and be an expert. In this Training, you’ll see all the services but you can be an expert in your own field.
Q2: What is Agile?
A: Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps teams deliver value to their customers faster and with fewer headaches. Instead of betting everything on a “big bang” launch, an agile team delivers work in small, but consumable increments.
Q3: What is Jenkins?
A. Jenkins is an open-source automation tool written in Java with plugins built for Continuous Integration purposes. Jenkins is used for building and testing the software projects continuously making it easier for developers to continuously work on the betterment of the product by integrating changes to the project, and making it easier for users to obtain a fresh build. It also allows you to continuously deliver your software by integrating with a large number of testing and deployment technologies.
Q4: How is azure DevOps different from Jenkins?
A: Azure DevOps is a complete project management and software shipment platform, providing an unlimited hosted git repository for better code integration and a complete agile and project management solution both on cloud and on-premises.
Jenkins is an open-source leading CI server known for its enormous integration plugins for building, testing, and deploying virtually any application. Read more about Azure Pipelines vs Jenkins
Q5: What is an Organization in Azure DevOps?
A. An organization is used to connect groups of related projects, helping to scale up an enterprise. You can use a personal Microsoft account, GitHub account, or a work or school account. Use your work or school account to automatically connect your organization to your Azure Active Directory (Azure AD).
Q6: Are Stories and Backlogs the same?
A. It depends on the Template. Here, we are using Parts Unlimited Template which is Scrum-based, so that’s why you see Backlogs under the Boards Hub but if you go for any other Template you’ll see the Stories instead of Backlogs.
Q7: Does DevOps Engineer replace the Scrum Master Role?
A. No, the Scrum Master Roles is not replaced by Azure DevOps Engineer. In Azure DevOps, we deal with only Azure Services and Azure DevOps Services. If you take any other DevOps Training like Scrum or DevOps Foundation then you’ll know more about the Scrum Master, there is a difference between these two roles.
Q8: We have Azure Board and you told me about the Trello Board also. Can you tell me how both are helpful in Azure DevOps?
A. Trello Boards are offered by Trello and are separate services for boards management and then if you wanted to work on everything in one location and start using Azure DevOps Boards then you have to migrate your entire components, flow charts, and notes from Trello Boards to Azure from the help of Azure Boards.
Q9: What if I have two email IDs (my customer perspective email id and my internal organization email id) connected to the same organization in Azure DevOps?
A. You can assign permissions to each individual user on a project in Azure DevOps. You can also invite a guest user by inviting them to your organization’s Active Directory. Read more about DevOps Organization.
Q10. Can we use SVN for open source in Azure projects?
A. Yes you can use SVN with Azure Pipelines. Azure Pipelines support the SVN. Know more about SVN here
Quiz Time (Sample Exam Questions)!
With our DevOps Engineer Program, we cover 150+ sample exam questions to help you prepare for the certification AZ-400. Check out these questions and see if you can answer them…
Question: Your company uses cloud-hosted Jenkins for builds. You need to ensure that Jenkins can retrieve source code from Azure Repos. Which three actions should you perform? Each correct answer presents part of the solution.
- A. Create a Webhook in Jenkins.
- B. Add the Team Foundation Server (TFS) plug-in to Jenkins.
- C. Add a personal access token to your Jenkins account.
- D. Create a Personal Access Token (PAT) in your Azure DevOps account.
- E. Create a service hook in Azure DevOps
Question: You have an Azure Resource Manager template that deploys a multi-tier application. You need to prevent the user who performs the deployment from viewing the account credentials and connection strings used by the application. What should you use?
- A. Azure Key Vault
- B. Web.config file
- C. Appsettings.json file
- D. Azure Storage table
- E. Azure Resource Manager parameter file
Comment your answers below.
References
- [AZ-400] Microsoft Azure DevOps Certification Exam: Everything You Need To Know
- [AZ-400] Roles And Responsibilities As An Azure DevOps Engineer
- [AZ-400] Azure DevOps Services for Beginners
- [AZ-400] Azure DevOps For Beginners
Next Task For You
Interested in other Microsoft Azure Certifications as well? Check out this blog post to know all about the [AZ-104] Microsoft Azure Certification Exam.
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