Creating Azure DevOps pipelines for web application

Abstract

DevOps is a concept which combines practices from software development and IT operations. The DevOps automation in web development projects is becoming the de facto standard in the web development industry. Automation can solve problems related to repetitive and time-consuming tasks. It can reduce the possibility of human error, for example, in the application deployment phase.

This thesis provides directional instructions on creating automated pipelines for basic client-server web applications using Microsoft Azure cloud computing products and Pulumi infrastructure as code method-based cloud resource management tool. The instructions focus on the technical perspective of setting up pipelines for the client, server, and infrastructure sections of the application. Instructions and solutions introduced in the thesis are based on development experiences during the implementation phase and literature review of technical documentation, articles, and publications.

The pipelines were successfully created for each part of the application. Pipeline development was not completely straightforward due to constraints of the Azure DevOps platform. Even though fully dynamical pipeline architecture was not achieved, pipelines were developed to support all necessary features like multiple environments, stages and parametrization.