Part 6: Automating the Climb — Azure DevOps & Deployment

Establishing Production-Ready Operations

The Final Challenge

Week eight. CloudVault is running smoothly, but Marcus realizes they’re still deploying manually. Every deployment is a manual process, error-prone and slow.

“We need to automate this,” he tells the team. “CI/CD pipelines, Infrastructure as Code, monitoring—everything needs to be automated.”

GitHub Actions CI/CD

GitHub Actions automates your build, test, and deployment pipeline.

Setting Up a Pipeline

Create .github/workflows/deploy.yml:

name: Deploy to Azure

on:
  push:
    branches: [ main ]

jobs:
  build-and-deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v3
    - name: Set up JDK 17
      uses: actions/setup-java@v3
      with:
        java-version: '17'
        distribution: 'temurin'
    - name: Build with Maven
      run: mvn clean package -DskipTests
    - name: Run tests
      run: mvn test
    - name: Login to Azure
      uses: azure/login@v1
      with:
        creds: ${{ secrets.AZURE_CREDENTIALS }}
    - name: Deploy to App Service
      uses: azure/webapps-deploy@v2
      with:
        app-name: api-cloudvault-prod
        package: target/account-api.jar

Infrastructure as Code with Bicep

Define your infrastructure in code:

param location string = 'eastus'
param environment string = 'prod'

resource appServicePlan 'Microsoft.Web/serverfarms@2021-02-01' = {
  name: 'plan-cloudvault-${environment}'
  location: location
  sku: {
    name: 'B2'
    capacity: 2
  }
  kind: 'linux'
}

resource webApp 'Microsoft.Web/sites@2021-02-01' = {
  name: 'api-cloudvault-${environment}'
  location: location
  properties: {
    serverFarmId: appServicePlan.id
    httpsOnly: true
  }
}

Application Insights Monitoring

Application Insights monitors your application’s health and performance.

Setting Up Monitoring

az monitor app-insights component create \
  --resource-group rg-cloudvault-prod \
  --app cloudvault-insights \
  --location eastus

Creating Alerts

az monitor metrics alert create \
  --resource-group rg-cloudvault-prod \
  --name "High Error Rate" \
  --condition "avg FailedRequestsPercentage > 5" \
  --window-size 5m \
  --evaluation-frequency 1m

Blue-Green Deployments

Run two identical environments and switch traffic between them.

Implementation with Traffic Manager

resource trafficManager 'Microsoft.Network/trafficManagerProfiles@2021-06-01' = {
  name: 'tm-cloudvault'
  location: 'global'
  properties: {
    profileStatus: 'Enabled'
    trafficRoutingMethod: 'Weighted'
    endpoints: [
      {
        name: 'blue-endpoint'
        properties: {
          targetResourceId: blueWebApp.id
          weight: 100
        }
      }
      {
        name: 'green-endpoint'
        properties: {
          targetResourceId: greenWebApp.id
          weight: 0
        }
      }
    ]
  }
}

Canary Deployments

Gradually shift traffic to the new version:

- name: Deploy to Canary (10% traffic)
  run: |
    az webapp traffic-routing set \
      --resource-group rg-cloudvault-prod \
      --name api-cloudvault-prod \
      --distribution green=10 blue=90

- name: Promote to Production (100% traffic)
  run: |
    az webapp traffic-routing set \
      --resource-group rg-cloudvault-prod \
      --name api-cloudvault-prod \
      --distribution green=100 blue=0

Disaster Recovery

Plan for failures:

# Enable automatic backups
az sql db backup-short-term-retention-policy update \
  --resource-group rg-cloudvault-prod \
  --server sqlserver-cloudvault \
  --database cloudvault_db \
  --retention-days 35

# Enable geo-replication
az sql db replica create \
  --resource-group rg-cloudvault-prod \
  --server sqlserver-cloudvault \
  --database cloudvault_db \
  --partner-server sqlserver-cloudvault-dr

Marcus’s DevOps Architecture

After implementing automation, Marcus has:

1. GitHub Actions — Automated build, test, deploy
2. Bicep — Infrastructure as Code
3. Application Insights — Monitoring and alerting
4. Blue-Green deployments — Zero-downtime updates
5. Canary deployments — Gradual rollouts
6. Disaster recovery — Backups and failover

Key Takeaways

• CI/CD pipelines automate build, test, and deployment
• Infrastructure as Code makes infrastructure reproducible
• Application Insights provides visibility into production
• Blue-Green deployments enable zero-downtime updates
• Canary deployments catch issues before full rollout
• Disaster recovery is non-negotiable for production

The Summit

You’ve completed the Azure Ascent series. You now understand:

• How Azure organizes resources
• When to use different compute services
• How to design data architectures
• How to build secure networks
• How to integrate AI capabilities
• How to automate operations

The summit awaits. Keep climbing.

This is Part 6 of a 6-part series: “The Azure Ascent: A Backend Engineer’s Journey to Cloud Mastery.”