DevOps is a huge buzz word of late, and for good reason. A company who fails to organize around this new culture of development and deployment will quickly find themselves falling behind the new pace of technology.

In a nutshell, DevOps is the collaboration of developers and IT pros to establish an environment where building, testing and releasing software happens rapidly, frequently, and with a high degree of reliability; compared to the traditional waterfall development methodology, which involves manual deployment and testing.

DevOps allows businesses to quickly answer key questions such as, “How do we change more rapidly to better satisfy our customers?” Why would you want to do this? As American engineer William Edwards Deming put it: “It’s not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.” If you don’t keep up with the needs of your customers, your relevance fades faster than ever.

Continuous delivery and deployment helps you get updates and changes into the hands of your customers faster than ever before, giving your business the agility it needs to sustain itself in the new world of “tomorrow is a day too late.” To become a DevOps enabled organization, a company must improve its way of work by enacting required cultural and process improvements. The Team Foundation Server offers a set of tools and concepts that can help you get there. While this topic is far too substantial for a single blog, I’ve written a book, “Beginning Build and Release Management with TFS 2017 and VSTS: Leveraging Continuous Delivery for Your Business,” to help you master build release management and leverage continuous delivery for your business. This book is for anyone who is involved in the software delivery process including: Build/Release Engineers, Configuration Managers, Software Developers, Test Automation Engineers, System Engineers, Software Architects and System/Production Support Engineers.

You’ll receive detailed, practical guidance on automating website deployments in Azure App Service, database deployments to Azure platform, Micro Services deployments in Azure Service Fabric, and more. Each deployment is structured with the aid of hands-on lessons in a given target environment designed to empower your teams to achieve successful DevOps.

I provide lessons on how to optimize build release management definitions using capabilities, such as task groups. With the help of practical scenarios, you’ll also learn how to diagnose and fix issues in automated builds and deployments. You’ll see how to enhance the capability of build and release management, using team services/TFS Marketplace extensions and writing your own extensions for any missing functionality via hands-on lessons.

What You Will Learn

  • Automate deployment to Azure platform, including Web App Service, Azure SQL and Azure Service Fabric
  • Test automation integration with builds and deployments
  • Perform Dynamic CRM deployment handling and package management with TFS/VSTS
  • Examine requirement to production delivery traceability in practical terms
  • Review cross platform build/deployment capabilities of TFS/VSTS.

For more information about the book and to purchase visit: https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Build-Release-Management-2017/dp/1484228103/

Chaminda Chandrasekara is an ALM/DevOps Architect at Navantis, Inc., now a Datavail company.

For additional resources, please download our white papers.

This post was written by Chaminda Chandrasekara
Chaminda is a Microsoft MVP for Visual Studio ALM and a Scrum Alliance Certified ScrumMaster®. He focuses on and believes in continuous improvement of the Software Development Lifecycle. He works as an ALM/DevOps Architect. Chaminda is also an active Microsoft Community Contributor (MCC), well recognized for his contributions in Microsoft forums, TechNet galleries, and Wikis. He also contributes extensions to Visual Studio Team Services/TFS in the Microsoft Visual Studio marketplace. His technical blog is popular among ALM practitioners around the world for quick and descriptive tech guidance.