Azure Devops - Introguide | How to create a Repo for your Projects

A brief introduction:

The word DevOps is on everyone's lips at the moment. But what does it mean....

Microsoft has made an attempt to explain it:

"A compound of development (Dev) and operations (Ops), DevOps is the union of people, processes and technology to continually provide value to customers.

What does DevOps mean for teams? DevOps enables formerly siloed roles – development, IT operations, quality engineering and security – to coordinate and collaborate to produce better, more reliable products. By adopting a DevOps culture along with DevOps practices and tools, teams gain the ability to better respond to customer needs, increase confidence in the applications they build and achieve business goals faster."

So in my own words, the term refers to a particular use case. It' s a way of providing software to the customer more quickly and in a higher quality. At least that's how I would describe it in a traditional way.

Of course, you can also apply DevOps methodologies without delivering software (for example, infrastructure in the cloud). In any case, there is a lot of automation involved and this leads at least to scripts, which, as I often hear, are also code (i.e. programming).

So now you have the task to write code (even as an infrastructure person). In my eyes, code always requires some kind of versioning, so that changes and improvements remain traceable.

And this is where "Azure Devops" comes into play. There is no need to operate your own GIT, SVN or TFS server. Microsoft's service offers this from the very beginning.

At the time when the article was created the following offer was valid:

So the whole thing is also quite affordable (especially if you are a small business (or even a one-person business).

Prerequisites for further actions:

• IDE VS Code installed
• Git installed

Activation Azure DevOps, repo creation and first push (upload to the cloud)

So, how do you get your own repo where you can store your work securely and versioned.

It's best to just start with the link posted earlier and the "start for free" option.

Now you have to register (you can also use an already existing Microsoft account).

Once you've accomplished that, you'll enter the Azure Devops Portal, where you can create your projects.

For example, I create a project for myself under the name "IT-Infrastructure.solutions". You can choose whether this should be accessible "publicly" or only "privately". I choose "private" for the moment.

Green highlighted the result (screen above).

Afterwards, we switch to the Repo item and include it via the "Clone in VS Code" button in Visual Studio Code (corresponds to a "pull" operation in Git).

Next, you just choose where you want to store the repo locally. Finally, it is then displayed in Visual Studio Code, e.g. as a workspace.

Since the repo is still empty, I am copying one of my PowerShellScripts into it.

To make the change effective, I switch to the source control icon and add the change using "+" (equivalent to an "add" operation in Git).

If I want to apply all made changes to the local repo I have to execute a "commit " via the " ✓ " symbol (corresponds to a "commit " operation in Git).

Each commit requires a comment describing what happened.

Lastly, you want to upload your change to the cloud.

This happens via a so-called "push" (corresponds to a "push" operation in Git).

Now you also find the file in your repo in the cloud.

Now you can be sure that you have saved and versioned your works for the future.

This "know-how" is, by the way, very in-demand in many companies and we have only touched the surface thematically here.

Additionally a small picture concerning the existing GIT - operations. Since a picture says more than thousand words, I attach it here below.