What is Azure Pipelines ?

1. Pre-requisite Knowledge

Before we start with the understanding of Azure Pipelines, we should know-

1. What is Cloud
2. What is Microsoft Azure
3. Continuous Integration (CI) & Continuous Delivery (CD).

2. Introduction of Azure Pipelines

Before getting started into actual topic, let’s get ourselves a brief about the word, PIPELINE.
So a Pipeline can be understood as a smooth, fast and automatically traversable path which consists of various elements in a sequential manner. Though it is often the case that the execution is followed in a parallel or tile allotted trend
Now coming to Azure Pipelines, it is a simple yet evident service of Microsoft, which helps in automating the building and the testing phases of the projects. In short an Azure pipeline combines both the Continuous Integration (CI) & Continuous Delivery (CD).
According to Microsoft docs, below are the supported languages for the Pipelining, as of now:

• Python
• Java
• JavaScript
• PHP
• Ruby
• C#
• C++
• Go

To implement Azure Pipelines in your project, it should be inside a version control system. It provide a seamless integration with the below service providers:

• GitHub
• GitHub Enterprise
• Azure Repos Git & TFVC
• Bitbucket Cloud
• Subversion

Features of Azure Pipelines (as per Microsoft Docs):

• Works with any language or platform
• Deploys to different types of targets at the same time
• Integrates with Azure deployments
• Builds on Windows, Linux, or Mac machines
• Integrates with GitHub
• Works with open-source projects.

Requirements for using Azure Pipelines:

• We need to create an organization in Azure DevOps
• The source code should be stored inside of a Version- Control system

Note: For public repositories, Azure Pipelines is free. Though for private repositories, 1,800 minutes (30 hours) of pipeline jobs for free every month

3. Conclusion - In this article, we have learned about:
   1. What is Azure Pipelines
   2. What are the languages it supports
   3. Why one should use it
   4. Requirements to use Azure Pipelines