Azure Pipelines · DevOps & CI/CD Deep Dive

Anatomy

Pipelines, Stages, Jobs

Pipeline — defined in azure-pipelines.yml (or via the legacy classic visual editor).
Stages → Jobs → Steps — same nesting model as most modern CIs.
Agents — Microsoft-hosted (Linux/Windows/macOS) or self-hosted via the agent service.
Tasks — pre-built steps from the marketplace; equivalent to Actions' actions.
Environments & approvals — first-class gates for prod deploys, with audit trail.
Service connections — store cloud creds (Azure, AWS, GCP, Docker registries) once, reuse everywhere.

Where It Shines

.NET first-class. NuGet, MSBuild, signing, ClickOnce, IIS deploys — all work without fighting.
Enterprise plumbing — AAD/Entra SSO, audit logs, policy controls, compliance reports.
Cross-cloud deploy — built-in tasks for AWS, GCP, K8s — not just Azure.
Free tier generous for OSS and small teams.
Good for hybrid — Microsoft-hosted agents for fast jobs, self-hosted for on-prem network access.

Tradeoffs

Microsoft is steering customers to GitHub Actions. Azure Pipelines is in maintenance mode for new features.
Two-config drift. Classic pipelines created in the UI can't easily be exported to YAML.
Smaller marketplace than Actions; some tasks are stale.
Documentation spans Azure DevOps + GitHub Actions overlap — easy to land on the wrong page.

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