CI/CD

In the Ultra Transcenders books

AI-300

Each book explains CI/CD in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.

Terms in this definition

• Azure Pipelines

  CI/CD service within Azure DevOps that deploys applications and infrastructure as code, with environments, approvals and checks.

• GitHub Actions

  Event-driven workflow automation in GitHub, started by things like a push or pull request. Typical uses include deploying Bicep or CLI templates and launching Azure Machine Learning jobs with no manual step.

Related terms

• Azure Load Testing

  Managed service generating heavy traffic, from Locust or JMeter scripts or simple URL tests, against apps wherever they're hosted. For Azure apps it also captures server metrics, and test criteria can fail a CI/CD run.

• CI

  Short for continuous integration: every change is built and tested automatically, normally paired with continuous deployment as CI/CD. A pipeline running az acr build then pushing the resulting image is one example.

• Declarative Automation Bundles

  Describes jobs, pipelines and other workspace resources in YAML and deploys them together as one project; this is the recommended route to CI/CD. The product was renamed, but its databricks bundle commands did not change.

• Everything as Code

  The idea in the Cloud Adoption Framework that infrastructure, policies, settings, deployments and documentation all live as code in a version-controlled repository. Changes go through peer review and CI/CD pipelines, so the repository becomes the one trusted record.

• ISV

  Short for independent software vendor. Such firms build SaaS products for their own customers on Fabric, and Microsoft's Fabric CI/CD guidance offers them a dedicated pattern based on one workspace per customer.

• Microsoft Foundry AI agent evaluation GitHub Action

  Brings offline evaluation of Foundry agents into CI/CD on GitHub. A test dataset is sent to the agents, catalogue evaluators grade what comes back, versions are compared statistically, and the result can hold back a release.

• PBIP

  A project format for Power BI Desktop in which the report and model are saved as plain-text definitions in folders, not as a single binary file, making Git and CI/CD practical. Switching to or from .pbix happens only via Save as.

• Public parameter mode

  Allows Dataflow Gen2 (CI/CD) parameters to be overridden at run time, by calling the Fabric REST API or from a pipeline's Dataflow activity. Every required parameter must then be supplied, and scheduling is possible only when there are no required parameters.