There are a lot of different ways you can set up Continuous Deployment to AKS - many of these ways may mean introducing a new tool. Introducing a new tool will require competence development, increased maintenance, auditing, and operating needs - not to mention that it will be a new external tool to add to your supply chain.

But what if you could utilize additional capabilities of the tool that you already have? That's where Azure DevOps Environments and multi-staged Azure Pipelines come into the picture! If you're actively using Azure DevOps and have all of your source code stored there, it can be easier and more lightweight for you to utilize Azure DevOps Environments as a deployment tool.

In this session, you will learn about what Azure DevOps Environments are and what can be the benefits of using them. You will also get recommendations on how to group Kubernetes resources in ADO Environments based on the speaker's experience.

A demo showing the flow from checking in your microservice to setting up an Azure DevOps Environment that will target an AKS cluster that the microservice will be deployed to and a deployment stage in the build pipeline that will execute the deployment itself based on the newly created ADO Environment.

You will also learn about additional policies and checks for an ADO Environment in order to implement even more granular control over your deployment to critical environments like the production environment.

Finally, we'll take a look at how much information you can retrieve directly from Azure DevOps once the application is deployed in AKS, both when it's running successfully and when something goes wrong and starts failing - without the need to interact with AKS cluster directly or learn kubectl.