Jenkins

Background For a long time sharing custom OS images between Azure subscriptions has been a painful, time consuming process. Thankfully Microsoft have addressed that with the introduction of Shared Image Gallery (SIG). However, the SIG is only as useful as the tools that can consume it and with SIG still in preview, some tools are not yet able to leverage it. Thankfully though, the Microsoft team that manages the Jenkins Azure VM Agents plugin have been quick to update the plugin to support the SIG.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) is used to provide automation of building, testing and deploying software into production environments. CI/CD has grown in popularity as it allows for greater efficiency in software development which in short allows developers to deliver quality code faster to the end user. The pipeline breaks down the delivery of software into different stages which as the name pipeline suggests, flow into each other. Automation is at the centre of the pipeline, each stage is automated, from build, onto testing, flowing down to deployment.