Tech That MattRs

A Foundational Blueprint

An Azure Stack Blog Post

Introduction
Key takeaway: Today, more and more organizations are using cloud resources to implement a continuous integration / continuous development (CI/CD) approach to deploying applications.
A hybrid continuous integration/continuous delivery(CI/CD) pipeline enables you to build, test, and deploy your app to multiple clouds

A single, consistent development approach
Key takeaway: Having a consistent set of development tools across the Azure public cloud and on-premises Azure Stack environments means that it is far easier for organizations to implement a practice of continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD). Apps and services deployed in Azure or Azure Stack are essentially interchangeable and can run in either location seamlessly.

A hybrid CI/CD pipeline can help you:
• Initiate a new build based on code commits to your Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) repository.
• Automatically deploy your newly built code to Azure for user acceptance testing.
• Once your code has passed testing, automatically deploy to Azure Stack.

Develop for Azure or Azure Stack
Key takeaway: Get started developing applications today, even if you don’t have access to an Azure Stack environment. Because Azure Stack delivers Microsoft Azure services that run in your datacenter, you can use similar tools and processes to develop against Azure Stack as you would with Azure.

• In Azure, you can create Azure Resource Manager templates that are also deployable to Azure or Azure Stack.
• There is a delta in service availability and service versioning between Azure and Azure Stack. You can use the Azure Stack policy module to restrict Azure service availability and resource types to what’s available in Azure Stack. Constraining available services will help your application rely on services available to Azure Stack.
• The Azure Stack Quickstart Templates are common scenario examples of how to develop your templates so they can be deployed to both Azure and Azure Stack. And are a quick way to get started developing applications right away.

Deployment considerations
Key takeaway: This foundational blueprint may apply to your solution if any of the following are true:

• My organization is using a DevOps approach, or has one planned for the near future.
• I want to implement CI/CD practices across my Azure Stack implementation and the public cloud.
• I want to consolidate the CI/CD pipeline across cloud and on-premises environments.
• I want the ability to develop applications seamlessly using cloud or on-premises services.
• I want to leverage consistent developer skills across cloud and on-premises applications.
• I am using Azure as my preferred development paradigm, but I have developers who will be working in an on-premises Azure Stack cloud.

Conclusion
The ability to use a single, consistent development approach across the Azure public cloud and on-premises environments is one of the biggest benefits of Azure Stack.