Table of contents
  1. Azure Pipelines
  2. Azure Pipelines Agents
  3. Create a Pipeline in Azure DevOps
    1. What You Need
    2. Steps to Create a Pipeline
    3. Editing Your Pipeline
    4. No Hosted Parallelism Available

Azure Pipelines

In Azure DevOps, Azure Pipelines are used to automatically build, test, and deploy any project to Dev, UAT, or PROD environments. This is how CI/CD is implemented using Azure Pipelines.

You can use Azure Pipelines for any type of project, be it C#, Python, iOS, Android, etc. Azure Pipeline is written in a YAML file, called azure-pipelines.yml, in your VS project folder.

Create your first pipeline

Azure Pipelines Agents

When a pipeline runs, it creates one or more jobs. These jobs need ‘a place’ to run. This place is the agent. The agent is a machine, VM, or cloud environment with the agent software installed, where the jobs can execute.

There are three types of agents:

  • Microsoft-hosted agent
  • Self-hosted agent
  • Azure VM agents

The agent is where the jobs for the pipelines run.

Create a Pipeline in Azure DevOps

What You Need

  • GitHub account: Create a free repository on GitHub.
  • Azure DevOps organization: Create one for free. If your team already has one, ensure you’re an administrator of the Azure DevOps project you want to use.
  • Ability to run pipelines on Microsoft-hosted agents: Your Azure DevOps organization must have access to Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs. You can either purchase a parallel job or request a free grant.

Steps to Create a Pipeline

  1. Fork the Repository
    • Open this link and click on Fork.
    • Click on Create fork.
  2. Sign in to Azure DevOps
    • Sign in to your Azure DevOps organization and go to your project.
  3. Create a New Pipeline
    • Go to Pipelines, and then select New pipeline or Create pipeline if it’s your first pipeline.
  4. Connect to GitHub
    • Follow the steps in the wizard by first selecting GitHub as the location of your source code.
    • You might be redirected to GitHub to install the Azure Pipelines app. If so, select Approve & install.
  5. Configure the Pipeline
    • Azure Pipelines will analyze your repository and recommend the Python package pipeline template.
    • When your new pipeline appears, check the YAML to see what it does. When you’re ready, select Save and run.
    • You’ll be prompted to commit a new azure-pipelines.yml file to your repository. After you’re happy with the message, select Save and run again.
  6. Watch Your Pipeline Run
    • If you want to watch your pipeline in action, select the build job.

You have now created and ran a pipeline that Azure automatically created for you, as your code was a good match for the Python package template. You now have a working YAML pipeline (azure-pipelines.yml) in your repository that’s ready for you to customize!

Editing Your Pipeline

  • When you’re ready to make changes to your pipeline, select it in the Pipelines page, and then edit the azure-pipelines.yml file.

No Hosted Parallelism Available

This means you haven’t purchased Parallelism. You can do this:

  1. Request Free Parallelism: Request Parallelism.
  2. Check Usage: Go to your Azure DevOps settings and check if all your parallel jobs are in use.
  3. Buy More Parallelism: If needed, buy more parallelism from the billing section in Azure DevOps.
  4. Set Up Self-hosted Agents: If you have your own resources, set up self-hosted agents to run your pipelines.

You can run the Azure Pipeline agent on your own computer and run the pipeline on a self-hosted Azure Pipeline Agent: Learn more.

Table of contents