Building a Containerized Continuous Delivery Environment with Azure and Team Foundation Server

At the Microsoft Ignite 2016 conference, the author presented how to use the Azure cloud platform together with Team Foundation Server (TFS) to build a containerized continuous delivery environment, and recorded a video to demonstrate the full workflow.

Continuous delivery is a core DevOps practice; employing containers can simplify many steps, as highlighted in the accompanying diagram where the red‑marked parts represent tasks that can be containerized.

Continuous delivery is not only CI + CD but a combination of culture, practice, and tools. A top‑down cultural shift supported by agile methods, bottom‑up problem discovery, and careful tool selection are essential; the diagram lists seven planning points on the horizontal axis and the desired goals on the vertical axis.

The demonstration video covers three main scenarios: (1) using Visual Studio and Docker for Windows for local development and debugging of containerized applications; (2) managing CI and CD pipelines with TFS; and (3) managing containerized development, testing, and production environments on Azure.

All code and materials shown in the demo are provided to the community as open source; readers can reply with “ignite2016” to the public account to obtain them.

Additional related articles are linked, covering new TFS 2017 features, upcoming Azure containerized DevOps data center sessions, and a series of Docker‑for‑.NET tutorials.