Azure DevOps is one of the most widely used CICD solutions in DevOps. It’s even very popular outside of the Microsoft realm. Many organizations use AWS and Azure DevOps to manage their CICD solutions. It’s fast, robust and fully hosted for you. This means that you don’t need to worry about platform management and infrastructure overhead.
Microsoft purchased GitHub in 2018 and GitHub Actions were developed almost immediately. This shows how important Microsoft believes it is to learn DevOps. It is clear that GitHub Actions will be around for a while, especially with Microsoft Build 2020. While Azure DevOps will continue to be available, it seems that GitHub Actions will be the central point of innovation.
This blog post will explain five key steps to help you transition from Azure DevOps into GitHub Actions.
Prerequisites for GitHub actions
You will need the following to follow along with this blog post:
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Understanding Continuous integration and Continuous delivery
Step 1: Create a GitHub account
You can skip step 2 if you already have a GitHub Account. This section will help you set up a GitHub Account so that you can start committing code and then deploy it with GitHub Actions.
Open a web browser to go to GitHub’s homepage.
Type in your username, email, password, and website address on the homepage. These credentials will be used to log in to GitHub. This password will be the same as a root password. After you have completed the information, click on the green Sign up to GitHub button.
To verify your identity, click on the blue button Verify. Once you are done, click the blue Join a Free Plan button.
Next, you will need to indicate what type of work you plan on doing and how much programming experience. You can choose from a variety of levels for programming experience. GitHub will even send you helpful tips if you don’t have any.
Once you have confirmed all information, click on the blue button to complete the setup at the bottom of this page.
For security purposes, you will be asked for verification of your email address. Once you are done, your GitHub account is created.
Step 2: Understanding the purpose of GitHub actions
You might be asking, “But wait! Microsoft put a lot of money and resources in Azure DevOps. So why GitHub Actions?” This is a question engineers and developers alike have asked. The answer is: GitHub actions is not Azure DevOps.
Azure DevOps was designed with the enterprise in view — the ability for enterprises to have a CICD solution. There were many other CICD solutions available before Azure DevOps. These included Travis CI and Jenkins. Many organizations found that they didn’t offer an enterprise solution. It wasn’t maintained by an individual or an organization. Azure DevOps fills that gap by offering a solution for DevOps needs for the people, by people.
GitHub, however, must remain neutral and not be geared towards Microsoft specifically. GitHub’s primary focus is to host open source projects. It is a place where developers can go to find new projects, share code ideas, discuss issues and concerns, and collaborate. Microsoft has made it clear that GitHub will continue to fulfill its mission.
Step 3: Azure DevOps Pipelines vs Workflows
GitHub Actions simply uses workflows. Azure DevOps uses pipelines. They are quite similar, but they also have their differences.
Pipelines are the best way to build and deploy code in Azure DevOps. There are currently two types of pipelines:
Classic
YAML
Pipelines are a great way to create build and release.