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How did you leverage your Azure DevOps Engineer Expert certification to improve CI/CD pipelines and deployment frequency at MMT Digital?
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Achieving the Azure DevOps Engineer Expert certification gave me a deep understanding of best practices for CI/CD and automation. At MMT Digital, from August 2022 to August 2024, I applied this knowledge to significantly improve our deployment processes.I started by analyzing our existing CI/CD pipelines to identify bottlenecks and areas for improvement. I looked at everything from build times to test coverage to deployment frequency. A lot of the time, the biggest problem is identifying the problem. People sometimes waste time on things which don't move the metrics which is not the best use of time and resources.I then implemented a series of changes to streamline the pipelines. This included automating manual tasks, parallelizing builds, and optimizing test execution. For example, I introduced containerization using Docker to ensure consistent environments across development, testing, and production. Also, I would refactor the code so that certain parts were split into modules that could be tested easier, with code unit testing, with full coverage. Sometimes it can be very hard to test code and so refactoring it makes it much better. I also leveraged Azure DevOps features like YAML-based pipelines and multi-stage pipelines to define more complex workflows. YAML-based pipelines is a great way to see a full picture of the CD process in a concise way. Multi-stage pipelines also made deployments in the cloud much easier, because you could make changes at a very granular and atomic level. To increase deployment frequency, I implemented automated testing at various stages of the pipeline. This included unit tests, integration tests, and end-to-end tests. By catching errors early in the development process, we could reduce the risk of deploying faulty code to production. When the code reached production, it meant that there was a much lower chance of bugs or issues, which could ultimately result in happy clients.The results were significant. We reduced deployment time by 30%, as mentioned in my CV. We also increased deployment frequency from once a week to multiple times a day. This allowed us to deliver new features and bug fixes to our users much faster. Faster deployment ultimately meant happier clients that could reap the benefits of the code faster than before. That is a great result. It is a win-win scenario for both the client and my team.The main thing is to follow the data and to keep experimenting to make the process better. Leveraging my Azure DevOps Engineer Expert certification at MMT Digital, I improved CI/CD pipelines by analyzing bottlenecks, automating tasks, and implementing Docker containerization. I also used YAML-based and multi-stage pipelines, automated testing at various stages, which reduced deployment time by 30% and increased deployment frequency to multiple times a day.