The DfE technical guidance and its content is intended for internal use by the DfE community.

Azure devops

Azure DevOps (see Microsoft documentation) provides version control, reporting, requirements management, project management, automated builds, testing and release management capabilities. In DfE it is mainly used to run pipelines and it makes sense to use it for CIP deployments as it’s tightly integrated to Azure.

When a service is onboarded to CIP, an Azure devops project is automatically provided, including service connection to the CIP subscription.

See: Azure Devops CIP portal

Release pipeline deprecation

The manually created release pipelines are deprecated. Any new pipeline should be created as code in yaml and stored in a git repository.

Extensions

New Devops extensions may be requested. They must be approved by Security before inclusion. Ask in #cloud-platform Slack channel for details.

Variable groups

Variable groups is data specific to Azure devops. For portability it is recommended to store variables inside of the yaml pipelines and secrets in Azure keyvault.