Azure Pipelines

What it is

Azure Pipelines is the CI/CD service inside Azure DevOps that automatically builds, tests, and deploys code. It runs cross-platform (Linux, macOS, Windows) and supports every major language and both private and public cloud targets.

Why it exists

Continuous integration means compiling and validating code on every change so integration problems surface immediately instead of at release time. Azure Pipelines provides a scalable, repeatable execution engine that runs your build/test steps on Microsoft-hosted agents (or your own) with secrets, caching, and release tooling built in.

Key ideas

• CI (continuous integration) builds & tests on every commit/PR; CD (continuous delivery) deploys the built artifact.
• Pipelines as code — defined in YAML (recommended) or in the classic visual designer (legacy).
• Trigger — CI/PR/scheduled triggers start a run; see ci-trigger.
• Jobs/steps/tasks — the execution model; see jobs-steps.
• Runs on agents & pools — Microsoft-hosted or self-hosted.
• Free for public projects; private repos get a monthly free allocation of Microsoft-hosted minutes.

Exam notes

• YAML-first is the current, recommended way to define pipelines (the classic editor is legacy/being phased out).
• Azure Pipelines supports both CI and CD; the “release pipeline” concept still exists in classic mode.
• azure-pipelines.yml is the conventional filename.
• Pools: Microsoft-hosted (ubuntu-latest, windows-latest, macos-latest) vs self-hosted.

Related

pipeline-yaml · agent-pool · jobs-steps · build-artifact · pipeline-templates · github-actions · self-hosted-agent

Diagram

Diagrams courtesy of Microsoft Learn / Azure docs: azure/devops/pipelines/get-started/what-is-azure-pipelines

📘 Source: Microsoft Learn — Azure Pipelines