Cloud Drops - What is Continuous Integration (CI)?

You may have heard about Software Code or Infrastructure as Code. Well, in this video, we’ll be talking about pipelines as code. If you’re familiar with tools like Azure DevOps, Circle CI, GitHub, GitLab and Jenkins, you may notice a trend where these platforms are allowing you to define your pipelines as code. Throughout this video, we’ll be defining a multi-stage pipeline in Azure DevOps, and picking up some tips along the way.

Have you ever had a scenario where you need to maintain versions of a set of files? Or have you needed to collaborate on files with colleagues in some way? That’s a common scenario for developers, infrastructure engineers or data scientists/developers. It’s an increasingly common problem. Some people solve this using file shares or FTP Servers with numerous files, v1, v2, v2-final, but that doesn’t scale and is quite a messy approach. Surely there is a better way? That’s where a Version Control System can really help you. One such option is Git. Git is a distributed version control system, which means that rather than relying on a central location to host and store the entire set of files and history, each machine has a full version of the codebase and history locally. This means each user can be productive locally and independently on their own machine. Git is also optimised to be very lightweight and perfomant.

Have you ever wondered how Git works behind the scenes? We’ll go ahead, initialise an empty folder as a Git repository and explore the .Git folder that is created.

Have you ever considered storing large binary files in your Git repositories? There are times where you may want to do this, e.g. for my podcast cloudwithchris.com to store my podcast files. Git LFS is an extension to Git which replaces large files with text pointers inside Git. Listen in to find out why you should care, how it works and what it is!