DevOps and Azure IaC Series: Build
In this series, we’ll explore the unique aspects of deploying CI/CD pipelines for Azure infrastructure, how it differs from software development, and the critical stages involved, including build and deploy phases, centralised pipelines, and other essential considerations. By the end, you’ll have the tools and knowledge to build robust, reliable pipelines for scalable and secure Azure deployments.
Are you struggling with scaling your Azure infrastructure deployments? This series is here to simplify the process and help you streamline your operations with DevOps best practices for IaC.
The Build Phase
The build phase is a critical step in the CI/CD pipeline, ensuring that your IaC definitions are clean, functional, and ready for deployment. This phase mirrors the software development lifecycle’s focus on creating reliable, bug-free applications—but tailored to the unique requirements of infrastructure code. Let’s explore how this works in detail:
The software development build process transforms raw code into deployable assets by automating key stages of compilation, testing, and packaging. It begins with fetching source code from version control, followed by compiling it into executables or containers. Unit and integration tests are executed to ensure functionality and catch errors early. Artifacts such as binaries, Docker images, or libraries are generated and stored for deployment. This process emphasises speed, consistency, and quality, integrating seamlessly into CI/CD pipelines to enable frequent and reliable releases.
For Azure IaC, the build phase takes a similar approach, adapted to infrastructure deployments. Here are the critical steps:
Linting: Just like in software development, linting helps enforce coding standards, detect errors, and promote best practices. For Azure IaC, tools like Bicep Linter ensure that your infrastructure definitions are consistent and free of misconfigurations, reducing the risk of deployment issues.
Validation: Simulate changes to your infrastructure before applying them with Azure What-If deployments. This step validates configurations and helps avoid unintended consequences, ensuring that your IaC aligns with expectations.
Surface Test Results: Integrating linting tools into your pipeline ensures that results are visible and actionable for the entire team, fostering accountability and continuous improvement.
Pipeline Build Artifacts: Using pipeline build artifacts is as important in infrastructure deployment as it is in software development. Artifacts package and version your infrastructure code, making it easier to manage and deploy consistently across different environments. For example, you can package validated Bicep templates as artifacts to reuse across staging and production environments.
Pipeline Templates
In the build phase, leveraging a reusable GitHub workflow (pipeline template) can significantly enhance the efficiency and consistency of deploying Azure IaC Bicep templates. To demonstrate this, I’ve added an example workflow to the repository linked below. This workflow integrates essential steps such as:
Linting to ensure code quality.
Azure What-If deployments to validate infrastructure changes.
Uploading code as a pipeline artifact to enable reusability and maintain traceability.
By consolidating these steps into a reusable workflow, you create a scalable and consistent foundation for all your Azure infrastructure deployments. This approach not only saves time but also reduces the likelihood of errors by standardising your processes.
Compiling these steps into a reusable pipeline template offers several benefits:
Standardisation: Ensures that all pipelines follow the same structure and best practices, improving reliability across deployments.
Reusability: Saves time by reducing the need to recreate workflows for every project.
Scalability: Supports consistent deployments across multiple environments and projects, enabling your team to scale infrastructure seamlessly.
Moving forward, this repository will serve as the central hub for all the code featured in this series, providing a cohesive and practical resource for your DevOps journey. Check out the repository to see how these concepts come to life and integrate them into your workflows.
Click here to view build example GitHub workflow
Conclusion
In this series, we’ll dive deeper into each of these topics and more, providing you with practical insights and best practices for deploying CI/CD pipelines for Azure infrastructure. Stay tuned for our next post, where we’ll explore the deploy phase and discuss centralised pipelines and managing deployments based on detecting files that have changed.