At the Build 2023 conference this week, Microsoft announced the general availability of the Azure Deployment Environment service, which provides developers with a portal to use Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaC) templates based on Terraform or Azure Resource Management files. bottom.
Additionally, Microsoft has enhanced Microsoft Dev Box, a workstation environment for developers running Azure, to include a portal that allows you to manage multiple environments.
Scheduled for general availability in July, Microsoft Dev Box is also previewing the ability to customize your environment using configuration files as code stored in Git repositories. Microsoft is also previewing tighter integration between Dev Box and its Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE) and Windows to further customize a developer’s environment.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) group, says that using these and other tools for building cloud-native applications, along with GitHub Actions, you can get your applications running in the Azure cloud. He told conference attendees that it would be easier than ever to build a . Services that include an integrated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.
Microsoft is also previewing GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps, which builds automated security checks using scanning tools natively into the Azure DevOps platform.
Other additions to the Azure environment include tools for centrally managing application programming interfaces (APIs) using the Azure API Center service available in preview.
Azure Event Grid has also been updated to allow individual event push as well as pull delivery using HTTP.
Finally, Microsoft is also previewing generative artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that make it easier to manage your cloud costs, including using prompts to summarize invoices and cost breakdowns.
Microsoft, along with its GitHub subsidiary, is at the forefront of applying generative AI to application development with tools like GitHub Copilot that developers can use to write better code faster. Its copilot functionality is now pervasive across Microsoft’s portfolio of applications and services.
It’s not yet clear what impact such tools will have downstream, but they should improve the overall quality of the applications being built, for example, by making fewer mistakes that can lead to vulnerabilities. .
Clearly, the way application software is built, constructed, and secured is about to change in the age of generative AI. Thanks to its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft has a significant head start over rivals building generative AI platforms that can also be applied to improve developer productivity.
In the meantime, DevOps teams should assume that as developers become more productive, the amount of code moving simultaneously through the pipeline is about to increase dramatically. There will inevitably be more opportunities to apply multiple forms of AI to alleviate potential DevOps bottlenecks, but it is clear that most of the immediate benefits are going to developers. .
However, one way or another, the overall speed at which applications are built and deployed is about to change dramatically. The challenge is to understand how these advances affect downstream DevOps workflows built on different eras of application development.
