Software development is a complex undertaking comprising of multiple processes, tools and involves people from different departments. They all need to come together and work in a cohesive manner. With so many variables, the risks are high while delivering to the end customers. One small omission or misconfiguration and the application might come crashing down. This chapter is about adopting and implementing practices that reduce this risk considerably and ensure that high quality software can be delivered to the customer again and again.

Before getting into the details about DevOps, let's understand problems faced by software companies that are addressed by DevOps.

• Organizations are rigid and do not welcome change
• Rigid and time-consuming processes
• Isolated teams working in silos
• Monolithic design and big bang deployments
• Manual execution
• Lack of innovation

In this chapter, we will go detail about the following:

• DevOps
• DevOps practices
• Configuration management
• Continuous integration
• Continuous deployment
• Continuous delivery
• Visual Studio Team Services
• DevOps preparation
• DevOps for PaaS solution
• DevOps for virtual machine (IaaS) based solutions
• DevOps for container (IaaS) based solutions
• Azure automation
• Azure tools for DevOps