Select a deployment automation solution, including GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines

GitHub Actions is a feature-rich, event-driven automation platform provided by GitHub. It allows developers to define workflows and actions that are triggered based on various events in a GitHub repository. These events can include push events, pull requests, issue comments, and more.

To get started with GitHub Actions, you need to define a workflow file (e.g., workflow.yml) in the .github/workflows directory of your repository. This file is written in YAML format and outlines the steps and conditions for each action. Here’s an example of a simple workflow that builds and deploys a web application:

name: Build and Deploy
on:
push:
branches:
- main

deploy:
needs: build
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Deploy to Azure Web App
uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
with:
app-name: my-web-app
slot-name: production
publish-profile: ${{ secrets.AZURE_WEBAPP_PUBLISH_PROFILE }}

This workflow defines two jobs: build and deploy. The build job checks out the repository, sets up the required Node.js version, installs dependencies, and builds the application. The deploy job relies on the successful completion of the build job and deploys the application to an Azure Web App using the Azure WebApps Deploy action.

Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines is a fully integrated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) service offered by Microsoft Azure. It provides a flexible and scalable solution for automating builds, tests, and releases across multiple platforms and languages.

To set up Azure Pipelines, you need to create a pipeline in Azure DevOps or by using a YAML definition file. Let’s take a look at a sample YAML pipeline definition that builds and deploys a .NET Core application to Azure:

trigger:
branches:
include:
- main

- task: AzureRmWebAppDeployment@4
displayName: 'Deploy to Azure Web App'
inputs:
connectionType: 'AzureRM'
azureSubscription: 'My Azure Subscription'
appType: 'webApp'
webAppName: 'my-web-app'
packageForLinux: '$(Build.ArtifactStagingDirectory)/**/*.zip'

This YAML pipeline definition specifies the steps required to restore NuGet packages, build the application, run tests, publish the application, and deploy it to an Azure Web App. The AzureRmWebAppDeployment task is used to deploy the application to Azure.

Conclusion

Both GitHub Actions and Azure Pipelines provide powerful deployment automation capabilities that can accelerate the software development lifecycle. GitHub Actions is tightly integrated with GitHub repositories, allowing for seamless event-driven workflows. Azure Pipelines, on the other hand, offers comprehensive CI/CD functionality and integrates well with Azure services.

Ultimately, the choice between these two solutions depends on your specific requirements and preferences. Both solutions have extensive documentation available, providing in-depth guidance on how to set up and configure workflows and pipelines. So, go ahead and explore these deployment automation solutions to enhance productivity and efficiency within your DevOps environment.