So, are you preparing for Azure DevOps interviews and looking for frequently asked Azure DevOps interview questions? Well, you have landed at the right place. It can be overwhelming to find many Azure DevOps interview questions online but going through all of them can be very time-consuming. In this blog, I will talk about the popular Azure DevOps interview questions that you must know in order to crack your Azure DevOps interviews with ease. We will be looking at the interview questions which a typical DevOps engineer faces in an interview. This is both for people who are new to the DevOps world and people who are experienced in other fields like Linux or production support and are willing or wanting to move to DevOps. So, let us get started!
What is the Azure DevOps?
Azure is a leading cloud service provider, and previously Azure DevOps was known as VSTS, which means visual studio team service. It is designed and managed by Microsoft. Azure DevOps is used to plan, collaborate better, and deliver the product faster. Azure DevOps is a single platform that helps every software development team in designing their applications with the agile process.
What are the Azure DevOps services?
There are five primary Azure DevOps services:
- Azure Board: This is where we maintain our item about whom that particular work item is assigned to and what is the status of that specific work item. All these things is maintained under Azure boards.
- Azure Repo: This service contains the information of the source code, like which developer has checked in the code or committed the code and where the versioning is. Azure DevOps will do the review for the code and test for all those things maintained under the Azure repo.
- Azure Pipeline: This service is used to take the code, which is committed and put it into the build, and after that, build and deploy the code to the production and other environments.
- Azure Test Plan: This service tests whatever code is checked in or committed by the developers.
- Azure Artifacts: This service checks the package version, as in the developer’s system, there are different types of the package version. Then it will check what is the production package versions if there is a mismatch. Then it maintains all the packages, so there is no breaking into the code into the production.
So, all these services have their different role, and every service contains a different type of tool according to how it works.
List out the changes from VSTS (Visual Studio Team Service) to Azure DevOps/Service.
In September 2018, Microsoft renamed VSTS (Visual Studio Team Service) to Azure services.
- Build and release in VSTS is now called Azure pipeline in Azure DevOps
- Code in VSTS is now called Azure repos in Azure DevOps
- Work in VSTS is now called Azure boards in Azure DevOps
- Test in VSTS is now called Azure test plans in Azure DevOps
- Packages in VSTS is now called Azure artifacts in Azure DevOps
What is Azure DevOps server?
Azure DevOps server, previously named as visual studio team foundation server, is the on-premises version of the Azure DevOps service. There are two types of server configuration, one is the cloud, and another one is on-premises. Cloud means where we keep our complete code on the cloud, and on-premises means the place where we keep the code is our local system. So, we keep the code either on cloud or on-premises, do the changes, and finally commit that code into the server repository.
What is the organization in Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps organization helps in handling multiple projects efficiently without confusion. Under the organization, we create the project. We can have multiple project and we would create multiple separate Azure type of organization, with one project in each organization. Also, under one organization, we can have multiple projects or one project.
What is a project in Azure DevOps?
A project provides a repository for source code and a place for a group of people to plan, track progress and collaborate on building software solutions. A project is only the place where it contains all the services, and it contains boards, repo, pipeline, test plan, and artifact services. We create a project under the organization, so every project must have at least one organization. Project is the place where the teams do the complete development work. Under a project, we define all the things, and even the developer commits the code into the projects only.
How many types of the project can we create in Azure DevOps?
There are two types of projects in Azure DevOps, public and private. A public project means we can access the project without any credentials, and it is publicly accessible. On the other hand, a private project needs the credential, and it is available only for authenticated users.
What is the work item in Azure DevOps?
The work item is a part of the work that is useful to complete the product development. We can add a work item to plan and manage our project. So the work Item is basically a kind of task or a feature that we assign to the particular user like a developer, and the developer works on that item. In the board, we can check the status of the specific item, like either it is in a build status, done status, etc. For creating a work item, we have to fill in some mandatory fields like title, description, assigned to, complete status, etc.
What is a board in Azure DevOps?
Azure board is one of the important services of Azure DevOps. It is used to track the tasks, features, and bugs related to the project. It tracks all the work happening in the project using the Kanban board. Azure DevOps works in agile mode, which means it works with the scrum. The Azure board also contains the work backlog, and it contains the dashboard, which gives all the necessary information about the projects.
What is the repository in Azure DevOps?
A repository is like a folder for our project. A project repository contains all of our project files and stores each file revision history. We can also manage a project work within the repository, and Azure repositories are set up with the version control tool that we can use to manage our code. It is used to manage the code systematically, so the repository is the place where we keep our full code as a versioning level or as per our requirements. We can manage our code under this repository. Even if any developer makes any changes, those changes go into this repository, and then updated files in the repository go into the deployment.
What is version control in Azure DevOps?
Version control enables us to track changes we make in our code over time, or we can say it is used to track or manage every code changes by a team member. So, to manage the code, we need version control software. We can use the version control system to keep track of each change done by each developer, safely merge them, test the changes, and publish the change into production.
There are many software available in the market to enable version control on our code. These are two types of version control available in Azure repos:
- Git: it is a distributed version control
- Team Foundation Version control: It is a centralized version control
What is the difference between centralized and distributed version control?
Centralized Version Control System:
- All file versions are stored on a central server
- No developer has a copy of all files on a local system
- If the central server crashes, all data from the project will be lost
Distributed Version control system
- Every developer has a copy of all versions of the code on their systems
- Enables team members to work offline and does not rely on a single location for backups
- There is no threat, even if the server crashes
What are pipelines in Azure DevOps?
Azure pipeline is a cloud service that you can use to build and test your code project automatically, and then you can make it available to other users. Azure pipeline combines continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) to test and build your code and ship it to the target audience constantly and consistently. It is used to deploy the code into production, and it can be triggered automatically or manually.
Final Thoughts
Azure DevOps is a trending topic in the DevOps domain because of the huge focus on DevOps from Microsoft Azure, and there is plenty to learn. Do not just mug up these answers, understand the technicalities of these answers also. You can find multiple Azure DevOps interview questions online, but these are the most frequently asked Azure DevOps interview questions which you must know, and these are the questions that will give you a kickstart to your future DevOps and Cloud related interviews. So, prepare well and all the best!
