Since the last lesson, the Kladde has been built on every pull request with GitHub Actions. Many companies that work with .NET and Azure, however, use Azure Pipelines for this, the part of Azure DevOps that builds and delivers. In this lesson, you build the same build a second time, this time with Azure Pipelines, for the same GitHub repository. That way you see both tools side by side and recognize what is the same and what isn't.
Azure DevOps in one paragraph
Azure DevOps is Microsoft's platform for software teams. It consists of several services: Boards (tasks), Repos (Git), Pipelines (build and deliver), Test Plans and Artifacts (package feeds, lesson 3.7.4). You can use all of them together or only some. The Kladde stays on GitHub and uses only Pipelines from Azure DevOps.
The structure has two levels:
- An organization (
https://dev.azure.com/<name>) is the frame: members, billing, agent pools and the parallel jobs belong to it. - A project in the organization contains pipelines, repos, boards and feeds. Permissions are usually assigned per project.
New projects are always private. Microsoft has discontinued public projects; new ones can no longer be created, and existing ones will become private in the future.
Who pays for the compute time
A run needs a parallel job, that is, the right to run a job at the same time as others. For private projects, there is a free quota on the agents hosted by Microsoft: one job at a time, at most 60 minutes per run and 1,800 minutes per month. This quota isn't active by itself. You unlock it by linking the organization to an Azure subscription under Organization settings, Billing. The link alone costs nothing; costs arise only when you buy additional parallel jobs. What that costs is on the Azure DevOps pricing page.
Take the Kladde's subscription from module 3.1. Your budget there will notify you if anything does cause costs after all.