Modern CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code in Practice

The best ideas often arise when you're not sitting at your desk. Just ask the Cloud & DevOps team at Axxes, who went to the safari park De Beekse Bergen last year during the .NET weekend. It was during a brainstorming session there that the idea of providing training on Modern CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code to interested colleagues, with a specific focus on the impact on developers, was born.

Thanks to Modern CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code, teams can create applications in a smarter way. Modern CI/CD comprises practices and tools that accelerate and automate the development, integration, and deployment of software. It involves continuously integrating code from multiple developers, running automated tests, and automatically deploying applications to different environments.

On the other hand, Infrastructure as Code is a concept where you define and manage infrastructure resources such as servers, networks, and databases using configuration files that machines can read. This allows you to treat infrastructure changes in the same way as changes to your software, enabling repeatable and scalable deployments.

Three Axxes-stars

It's no surprise that the team came up with this topic for a workshop, as the three instructors have gained a lot of knowledge and experience in this area. Take Rival Thompson, for example, who has been with Axxes for almost six years, working on projects for companies like Katoen Natie and Kinepolis. He has conducted several workshops on Azure and has extensive experience with Azure Resource Manager and Bicep due to his work.

His colleague, Jensen Somers, is also well-versed in Azure, Azure DevOps, and Pulumi. Meanwhile, Matthias Heylen has had experience with Terraform in the past, making them a top team for a packed day of Modern CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code! Every Axxes consultant who wanted to could participate in the workshop held on June 13th.

The Azure tools in a CI/CD pipeline

In the end, more than ten colleagues participated in the workshop, where they learned together how to deploy an application correctly. They achieved this by building a build and publish pipeline in Azure DevOps, which serves as a good starting point for setting up a new CI/CD pipeline on other projects as well.

After successfully building and packaging the application, the focus shifted to the infrastructure. New objects from the application are written to an Azure SQL database, while photos are stored in a Blob Storage. During the workshop, the Axxes consultants also learned about the Azure App Service needed to run the application, the Azure Configuration Store for storing the configuration, and an Azure Key Vault for storing secrets.

In this workshop, the infrastructure was set up using Bicep, a domain-specific language from Microsoft for creating Azure resources. Bicep is a declarative language, meaning you focus on describing the desired state of your infrastructure rather than worrying about the exact steps to achieve this state.

Terraform & Pulumi

Another tool covered in the workshop is Terraform, a popular Infrastructure as Code tool from HashiCorp. With Terraform, it's possible to create Azure resources, which can often be more convenient than using Bicep. This is because Terraform can manage other cloud providers as well, including AWS, Cloudflare, or GCP.

During the workshop, the differences between the two became apparent quite quickly. Bicep is specifically designed for the Azure ecosystem, offering a simplified syntax, native integration with Azure services, and a deeper abstraction of the underlying infrastructure, while Terraform is a platform-agnostic tool that supports multiple cloud providers and services, making it more flexible for multi-cloud environments.

Another tool introduced in the workshop is Pulumi, which is somewhat of an outlier. Since Pulumi has an SDK for the most commonly used programming languages, it's possible to set up your Azure infrastructure in C#, which many developers appreciate.

What's next?

The first workshop led by these three Axxes consultants definitely left attendees wanting more. Undoubtedly, there will be more to come!