Azure DevOps – DEVOPS DONE RIGHT

ServiceNow – Azure DevOps Integration

The IT industry needs optimal efficiency in its enterprise, which is not an easy task. Traditional practices are still in use but are not beneficial as they can slow down the process considerably. So, here comes ServiceNow, which has become a complete packed solution for IT Industries.

ServiceNow is software based on the cloud, providing IT services for automating business tasks and their management. It uses Machine Learning technology to automate processes and create workflows.

Azure DevOps supports a collaborative culture and set of processes that bring together developers, project managers, and contributors to develop software. It allows organizations to create and improve products at a faster pace than they can with traditional software development approaches.

In this article, we will discuss, how to use ServiceNow effectively by integrating it with Azure DevOps.

Prerequisites for Integration

An Azure DevOps organization. Create an organization, if you don’t have one already.
A non-developer instance of ServiceNow.

Configure the ServiceNow instance

Install the Azure Pipelines extension on your ServiceNow instance. You’ll need Hi credentials to complete the installation. See Buying Overview for more details on installing apps from the ServiceNow store.
Create a new user in ServiceNow and grant it the following role: x_mioms_azpipeline.pipelinesExecution.

Introduction to Azure Active Directory

Introduction:

In organizations, employees often need access to various Azure services to perform their tasks. They can use services like SQL database or Azure container services when the system administrator assigns them a user id and password for each service. However, managing multiple user logins for each service can be a hassle for administrators, especially in organizations with over 1000 employees. Azure Active Directory (AD) helps solve this issue by enabling administrators to manage multiple user logins in a centralized manner.

Increasing Code Reusability Using Task Groups in Azure DevOps

Let’s assume a scenario in which you are repeating a few tasks from your pipeline into multiple stages and/or pipelines or projects. In that case, it gets really tiring to repeat and configure each task individually over and over again. Azure DevOps provides the feature of Task Group in which we can encapsulate a sequence of tasks from our build or release pipelines and reuse those tasks in other pipelines.

What is Azure DevOps?

Now, let’s talk about Azure DevOps, it is a mixture of the simplest technologies and best practices. Therefore we can go as far as saying that it is the Next Big Thing in the IT Industry. Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft providing an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. Microsoft launched this as they understood the fact that DevOps has become vital to a team’s success.

Task Group

A task group facilitates the encapsulation of a sequence of tasks, defined already in a build or a release pipeline, into a single reusable task that can be added to a build or release pipeline (like any other task). We can, as per our choice, extract parameters from the encapsulated tasks as configuration variables, and abstract the rest of the task information.

The new task group is automatically added to the task catalog, ready to be added to other releases and build pipelines. At the project level, the task groups are stored and are not accessible outside the project scope.

Introduction to Azure Security

DevOps Security or DevSecOps is a set of practices and tools that bring together software development (Dev), IT operations (Ops), and security (Sec) to increase an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services securely. DevOps presents new risks that create security challenges that cannot typically be addressed by conventional security management solutions and practices. One of the prominent security challenges in DevOps environments is privileged access management. DevOps processes require human and machine privileged credentials which are quite powerful and highly susceptible to
cyber-attacks. So strong security practices should be inserted throughout the application lifecycle to reduce vulnerabilities, improve security posture and mitigate risk.

How To Setup An Agent On Azure Devops

Azure DevOps is an integrated service provided by Azure. In recent times, it is observed that Azure DevOps is increasing its penetration into the DevOps community. Being a SaaS service, it doesn’t come with a pre-configured host or better say, an agent to execute its commands. That’s why whenever we want to use our Azure DevOps Pipeline we need to have an agent configured in our Agent Pool. In this blog, we will learn how to configure an agent and later on how to create a service for our host.

Let’s Get Started

Configuring a self-hosted Agent might seem complicated but by following the below steps we can easily configure an agent in our Agent Pool. So let’s get started.

What is Azure DevOps?

Now, let’s talk about Azure DevOps, it is a mixture of the simplest of technology and therefore the application of best practices. We can say, it is the Next Big Thing in the IT Industry. Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. Microsoft recently launched this as they understand that DevOps has become vital to a team’s success.

Azure Self-hosted Agent

An agent that you set up and manage on your own to run jobs is a self-hosted agent. Though we can use a Microsoft Hosted Agent, we prefer a self-hosted Agent. This is to have more control to install dependent software needed for our builds and deployments, machine-level caches and configuration persist from run to run, boosting speed and maintaining the backup of our logs. You can use self-hosted agents in Azure Pipelines or Azure DevOps Server, formerly named Team Foundation Server (TFS). To successfully configure a self-hosted Agent we need an Agent Pool, download & unzip the package, Personal Access Token (PAT) and execute a few shell commands. Let’s move step by step.