Here’s an overview of the content typically covered in Azure DevOps courses, aimed at learners looking to understand how to use Microsoft Azure for DevOps practices, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), and cloud-based application lifecycle management.

1. Introduction to Azure DevOps

Key Topics:

• What is Azure DevOps?: Overview of Azure DevOps and its capabilities as a suite of development tools for managing the software development lifecycle.
• Azure DevOps Services: Introduction to key Azure DevOps services, including Azure Boards, Azure Repos, Azure Pipelines, Azure Test Plans, and Azure Artifacts.
• Understanding DevOps: Understanding DevOps culture, principles, and practices—collaboration, automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and feedback loops.
• Azure DevOps and Cloud Adoption: Exploring how Azure DevOps fits into cloud adoption strategies, hybrid cloud, and enterprise DevOps pipelines.

2. Azure DevOps Organization Setup

Key Topics:

• Creating and Configuring Azure DevOps Organization: How to set up an Azure DevOps organization, manage projects, and configure team settings.
• Azure DevOps Projects: Creating, managing, and organizing projects in Azure DevOps. Understanding how to manage repositories, pipelines, and boards within a project.
• Permissions and Access Control: Managing user access, roles, and permissions within an Azure DevOps organization, including service connections and agent pools.
• Azure DevOps Work Items: Managing work items, backlogs, sprints, and queries using Azure Boards.

3. Azure Repos (Version Control)

Key Topics:

• Introduction to Azure Repos: Overview of Azure Repos, a set of version control tools that allow you to manage your code base.
• Git vs. TFVC: Understanding the difference between Git (distributed version control) and TFVC (Team Foundation Version Control), and when to use each.
• Creating and Managing Repositories: Creating and managing Git repositories in Azure Repos, cloning repositories, and pushing and pulling code.
• Branching and Merging: Best practices for branching and merging code, including Git workflows (e.g., feature branches, Git flow).
• Pull Requests (PRs): Using pull requests to review and merge code, manage approvals, and resolve merge conflicts.

4. Azure Pipelines (CI/CD)

Key Topics:

• What is Azure Pipelines?: Introduction to Azure Pipelines and its ability to automate the build, test, and release process for your applications.
• Setting Up Continuous Integration (CI): Creating build pipelines to automate the process of building and testing your code whenever changes are made.
• Setting Up Continuous Delivery (CD): Automating the deployment process with release pipelines, enabling automatic deployments to different environments (e.g., development, staging, production).
• Pipeline Triggers and Variables: Configuring pipeline triggers, using variables to pass data between pipeline stages, and setting up environment variables.
• Pipeline as Code: Using YAML syntax to define pipeline configurations and enabling pipeline versioning and reuse.
• Azure DevOps Agents and Agent Pools: Managing build agents, agent pools, and self-hosted agents for running pipeline tasks.

5. Azure Artifacts (Package Management)

Key Topics:

• Introduction to Azure Artifacts: Understanding how Azure Artifacts helps in managing packages, such as NuGet, npm, and Maven packages, within your organization.
• Creating and Managing Feeds: Setting up package feeds to host and share packages across teams and projects.
• Publishing and Consuming Packages: How to publish custom packages to Azure Artifacts and integrate them into your builds and releases.
• Package Security: Understanding package security features, such as access control and versioning, to ensure packages are available and secure.
• Integration with Pipelines: Using Azure Artifacts in build and release pipelines to manage dependencies and ensure version consistency.

6. Azure Boards (Work Tracking and Agile Management)

Key Topics:

• Introduction to Azure Boards: Overview of work tracking, agile project management, and planning tools available in Azure Boards.
• Work Items: Creating and managing work items, such as user stories, bugs, tasks, and features, and associating them with source code and commits.
• Backlogs and Sprints: Managing product backlogs, prioritizing work, and organizing tasks into sprint cycles.
• Kanban and Scrum Boards: Configuring Kanban boards or Scrum boards for visualizing and managing work.
• Tracking Progress: Using Azure DevOps dashboards and reports to track team progress, burndown charts, velocity, and other metrics.
• Customizing Work Items: Customizing work item types, workflows, and field values to fit your organization’s needs.

7. Azure Test Plans (Quality Assurance)

Key Topics:

• Introduction to Azure Test Plans: Overview of test management tools within Azure DevOps for managing manual and automated testing efforts.
• Creating and Managing Test Plans: How to create test plans, test suites, and test cases for manual testing.
• Automated Testing Integration: Integrating automated tests into build and release pipelines, using tools like Selenium, NUnit, and Visual Studio Test.
• Test Execution and Tracking: Running test cases, logging defects, and tracking test execution results.
• Continuous Testing: Setting up continuous testing in your CI/CD pipelines for automated validation of code changes.

8. Monitoring and Logging in Azure DevOps

Key Topics:

• Azure Monitor and Application Insights: Using Azure Monitor and Application Insights to track application performance, diagnose errors, and gain insights into production environments.
• Log Analytics: Setting up log analytics to collect, query, and analyze data from Azure resources and pipelines.
• Pipeline Analytics: Tracking pipeline performance, build and release times, and failure rates to improve pipeline efficiency.
• Alerts and Notifications: Configuring alerts and notifications for pipeline failures, build issues, and deployment problems.

9. Security and Compliance in Azure DevOps

Key Topics:

• Azure DevOps Security Best Practices: Implementing security controls and practices for Azure DevOps projects and resources.
• Identity and Access Management (IAM): Managing user roles, permissions, and Azure Active Directory integration.
• Secure Pipeline Practices: Ensuring secure coding practices, using secrets and secure files in pipelines, and leveraging Azure Key Vault for sensitive information management.
• Compliance and Governance: Understanding compliance requirements, setting up audit logs, and ensuring regulatory standards are met within your DevOps processes.

10. Advanced Azure DevOps Topics

Key Topics:

• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Implementing IaC using tools like Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, Terraform, and Azure DevOps pipelines.
• Managing Multiple Environments: Setting up pipelines and releases that deploy to multiple environments, such as staging, production, and test.
• DevOps Analytics and Reporting: Using Azure DevOps Analytics to generate detailed reports on pipeline performance, work tracking, and project management.
• DevOps Automation: Automating infrastructure provisioning, software delivery, and security scans through Azure DevOps pipelines and Azure services.