Cloud choices make an impact throughout an IT organization—the data center, operations, and development teams all need to adapt to changes. With proper training, they can leverage the new technology to streamline and improve the quality of their IT service. That’s particularly true for development teams, where cloud provides a vast array of supporting tools that make building applications easier. Here’s how the Microsoft Azure cloud helps throughout the application development process:
1. Develop the application
To start with, Microsoft Azure gives developers several different ways of building and delivering applications. By choosing the right approach, the effort of creating the development environment can be reduced. Leverage Azure Functions and your team can create a serverless application where they don’t need to worry about the underlying environment at all.
Azure also provides a large number of APIs that reduce the lines of code development teams need to write by letting them call on pre-tested libraries. There are libraries and services designed for specialized purposes such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, media, and mobile, among others. Other APIs provide access to tools such as containers and databases. In addition, developers can choose to use a delivery model such as the Azure App Service that provides built-in support for key authentication methods including Azure Active Directory, Facebook, and Google.
2. Test the application
Once the application is coded, it needs to be tested. Azure’s tools ensure that thorough testing can take place. Azure Test Plans provides a suite of tools to support manual and exploratory testing, while Azure Pipelines allow the testing process to be automated. Azure DevTest Labs provides preconfigured templates for test environments.
3. Deploy the application
With pipeline support for DevOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery, deployments can be automated once development is complete. Numerous third-party DevOps tools are available within Azure, or you can use Azure DevOps. Support for Kubernetes and Docker, along with services like Azure Resource Manager, ensure deployments contain everything the application needs.
After deployment, Azure’s tools enable monitoring of user behavior as well as performance and other production issues. Azure Monitor gathers numerous metrics, and Application Insights helps teams analyze and understand the captured data.
VAST IT Services provides support for the full suite of Microsoft Azure services. Cloud isn’t just about infrastructure, and our team helps clients leverage Azure’s capabilities to improve their application development process as well as data center operations. Contact us to learn more about the ways Microsoft Azure can improve how your IT team can build better applications using Microsoft Azure.
