At the recent Connect() event, Microsoft announced several new features and integrations with Azure Pipelines. The new features and integrations include an Azure Pipelines extension for Visual Studio Code, management of GitHub Releases, support for IoT projects, and ServiceNow integration.
Since the launch of Azure Pipelines in September, the adoption of this cloud-hosted build and deployment service is growing. Jeremy Epling, principal group program manager, Azure DevOps, said in the blog post about the announcement:
We’re also learning from many of the open source projects on GitHub starting to take advantage of unlimited build minutes, and with up to 10 concurrent jobs across our hosted Linux, Windows, and Mac machines.
One of the new features is the extension of Azure Pipelines for Visual Studio Code providing developers with syntax highlighting and IntelliSense that's aware of the Azure Pipelines YAML format. Furthermore, the IntelliSense is also schema-aware – anywhere in the YAML file, a developer can make a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl-Space on Windows or Cmd-Space on MacOS) and examine what has been acepted at that point in the file.
With Azure pipelines, developers can now also manage GitHub releases – a way to package and ship software. Microsoft added new GitHub Releases task, which supports all the commonly performed actions such as attaching binary files, publishing draft releases, and marking a release as pre-release.
Furthermore, Microsoft added support in the Azure portal for Azure IoT Edge in the Azure DevOps project workflow to quickly get started with deploying IoT based solutions. Epling stated in the blog:
With support for Azure IoT Edge in Azure DevOps projects, you are able to easily get started when deploying IoT Edge modules written in Node.js, Python, Java, .NET Core, or C. Along with this, it sets up everything you would need to develop, build, and deploy your IoT Edge application including:
• A Git code repository complete with a sample IoT Edge application in any of the above languages
• A build and a release pipeline setup for deployment to Azure
• Easy provisioning of all Azure resources required for Azure IoT Edge
Lastly, Microsoft also provides Azure Pipelines users with integration for ServiceNow, a cloud service around the management of "incident, problem, and change" IT operational events. With the new ServiceNow Change Management extensions, users can automate the deployment process using Azure Pipelines and ServiceNow Change Management for risk assessment, scheduling, approvals, and oversight.
By adding a ServiceNow Changes Management task in a deployment process, users can keep the ServiceNow change request updated with the status and result of the deployment. Furthermore, Epling stated in the blog that executing this task results in capturing the release information on the pipeline, and thus provides traceability.