Chapter Seven
Developer Tools & Integration
Seven services for shipping code and decoupling systems — pipelines and a container registry on the delivery side, messaging and eventing on the integration side. Choosing the wrong messaging primitive is a costly rewrite.
Core Terminology
Delivery and integration on Azure share a vocabulary for pipelines and messaging. These terms recur across the chapter.
Pipeline
An automated build-test-deploy workflow defined as YAML in Azure Pipelines, triggered by commits and gated by approvals.
Message vs Event
A message is a command with an expectation (Service Bus); an event is a notification of something that happened (Event Grid). The distinction drives the service choice.
Topic & Subscription
A publish-subscribe pattern where publishers send to a topic and multiple subscribers receive filtered copies — in both Service Bus and Event Grid.
Throughput Unit
Event Hubs' capacity dial for ingress and egress. Streaming millions of events per second means provisioning or autoscaling these.
Dead-Letter Queue
A holding queue for messages that cannot be delivered or processed, so failures are captured rather than lost.
Stateful Workflow
A long-running orchestration, as in Logic Apps, that waits on external events and survives restarts without you managing the state.
Services in This Chapter
Service 46
Azure DevOps
The suite for boards, repos, pipelines, artifacts, and test plans. End-to-end delivery for teams that want an integrated alternative to stitching tools together.
Service 47
Azure Pipelines
Cloud CI/CD with YAML pipelines, hosted or self-hosted agents, and deployment to any cloud. The build-and-release engine within Azure DevOps.
Service 48
Container Registry
A private registry for container images and artifacts, with geo-replication, image scanning, and build tasks. The source of truth for what AKS and Container Apps run.
Service 49
Azure Service Bus
Enterprise messaging with queues and topics, ordering, sessions, and transactions. For commands that must be processed reliably and exactly once.
Service 50
Event Grid
A serverless event router delivering discrete events from Azure and custom sources to handlers, with filtering and retries. Reactive, push-based integration.
Service 51
Event Hubs
A big-data streaming ingestion service taking millions of events per second, with Kafka compatibility. For telemetry, logs, and analytics pipelines.
Service 52
Logic Apps
A low-code workflow engine with hundreds of connectors for integrating SaaS and Azure services. For orchestration and automation without writing glue code.