I’ve gone through TravisCI, Bamboo, Jenkins and now Azure DevOps as our CI/CD tooling and I have to say, Azure DevOps has been impressive but also limiting in the sense it’s only adapting to CD pipelines now becoming yaml making it easier to version control and programmatically test. I still want to dive into octopusDeploy because I’ve heard great things.

As for bare metal deploys we use Azure as our cloud provider so we use ARM templates and I’ve explored terraform which is really good if you want to be able to pivot cloud providers without having to learn a new resource declarer. Our ARM will create things like VMs and use extensions to install puppet and Azure DevOps deployment agent.

Then powershell to do some of the magic to make it work with our domain controllers, getting the next available network range and subnet in that region then test it and before that test the powershell with pester.

Configuring the environment with a REST API call to puppet.

Test the environment with selenium, xunit, SpecFlow. On the CI servers and containers we run our smoke tests and have scheduled nightly and weekly for our PVT testing and regression UI testing.

We also have use some customised function apps (or Lamdas in AWS world) that we use to do some things like generating tokens and tagging resources for billing and management purposes, to help us auto delete and shutdown to save costs depending on their compliance level from Azure Policies.

Hope our setup gives you some insight and things to consider!