DevOps

GitHub is a DevOps tool for automated deployment that gives our developers opportunities to spend more time working on code by reducing time spent on ancillary tasks. Coordinating work, collaborating on code, and using actions to trigger deployment are all made easier with this popular development tool. By simplifying workflows, GitHub reduces the amount of time needed to develop software.

GitHub Actions is GitHub’s built-in CI/CD service. We use it to build, test, and deploy on every pull request and merge, publish packages and containers, and run security and dependency checks, with workflows kept in the repository next to the code they ship.

This Microsoft product enables DevOps capabilities and covers the entire application lifecycle by providing requirements management, reporting, automated builds, project management, and testing and release. We can use Azure DevOps as a back-end for numerous integrated development environments (IDEs).

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows us to define and provision infrastructure using a high-level configuration language. It supports multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments, enabling consistent and efficient resource management. Key features include infrastructure as code, multi-cloud support, and automation, making it easier to scale and maintain applications.

Bicep is Microsoft’s infrastructure-as-code language for Azure. It describes resources in a short, readable syntax, compiles to ARM templates, and always supports new Azure features on day one. We use it, or Terraform, to make Azure environments repeatable and reviewable instead of clicking through the portal.

The Docker platform uses OS-level virtualization to deliver software in isolated containers (packages) that communicate with each other through clearly defined channels. While the containers are isolated, they share services from a single operating system kernel, which utilizes fewer resources than virtual machines do. Docker gives our team flexibility because it can run in a variety of locations (on premise, in public, private cloud) and interfaces (Linux, Windows, macOS).

Aspire is Microsoft’s open-source toolkit for building and running distributed apps. Services, databases, and queues are wired together in code, developers get a local dashboard with logs, traces, and metrics, and the same setup deploys to Azure. It started as .NET Aspire and now runs Python and JavaScript services too.

Application Insights is the application monitoring service in Azure Monitor. It collects requests, dependencies, exceptions, logs, and traces through OpenTelemetry, so we can see how a system behaves in production, find slow or failing calls, and set alerts before users notice a problem.

OpenTelemetry is the open, vendor-neutral standard for collecting traces, metrics, and logs. .NET, Node.js, Python, and most other platforms support it, and it feeds tools like Application Insights, the Aspire dashboard, Grafana, and Datadog. We instrument with it so clients can see how their systems behave without being locked into one monitoring vendor.