How empowering is Azure as a unified environment for DevOps?

What is DevOps?

As the name suggests, DevOps is all about nurturing a strong partnership between development and operations disciplines. It is merger of people, process and technology with the purpose of enhancing effectiveness, bringing new apps and functionalities to the market promptly and in maintaining updates in these apps throughout the lifespan. What this means from IT operations perspective is that DevOps Makes sure that operational requirements can be defined collaboratively right from development process and followed throughout the life cycle. From development test perspective, each infrastructure requirement will just be compiled for code. This makes spinning of these IT compliant environments quick and easy. Development and operations become a virtuous motion as the user plans, builds, deploys and operates apps and gathers continuous feedback that he or she can continuously integrate back into the development process.
How Azure makes DevOps seamless?
• Azure is an open platform with lots of choices to support the tools and frameworks
that developers use.
• Dev Test Labs- This enables the users to spin up a preproduction testing and staging
environment quick and fast, with appropriate permissions and scope to control costs.
Resources can be easily assigned to dev test lab.
• Infrastructure-as-code – This is key feature of DevOps. If developers want to get new
features out at fast rate then this is the main way to ensure supply of consistent,
compliant and repeatable dev test, QA and production environment. This allows the
user to use templates and scripts to define the infrastructure powering each of these
environments. Azure resourse manager template written in Jason provides the code
that allows the user to define the required infrastructure.
• Existing Azure recourse manager templates can be easily used.
• Apart from cost control policies, user can even control VM images and templates.
• Apt images for VMs can be selected from market place or custom images can be
build.
• Role-based access control or RBAC has been simplified in dev test lab.