Azure DevOps deploy overview

Question

I am looking for some help to understand how to use Azure DevOps to deploy the application I am working on to a Windows VM.

Currently process: Our code is currently in Azure Git repo and we have two QA servers, the QA servers have been setup already. Every time we go to QA server to manually pull the lastest code with command line git pull command. Then run a web page to upgrade/downgrade database if database script has been updated.

Goal: Would use Azure DevOps to automate the process.

Here is what I would know:

• 1) With Azure DevOps, when deploying the code to QA server, could we only copy over the changed files? The software package is pretty big, it would take long time to copy the whole thing.
  
• 2) How Azure DevOps move files to QA server, does it use Git pull or file copy?
  
• 3) When using Azure DevOps tools, could we trigger a http(s) request?
  
• 4) Is there any tool I could check if Git repo has updates?
  
• 5) Is there any tool support if/else logic, because we would trigger the http(s) request only if Git repo has changes.
  

Just would get an overall idea.

Answer 1

1. as far as I know there is no layering\\caching.
2. how would it use git pull to download from a web server? its using http request to download the package
3. not sure I understand the question, but you can have a script step in the deployment and do whatever you like (ie http(s) request)
4. this question doesnt make sense, you can use git command line, but I dont understand how that ties to the release process. you should build your code on commit and create a package that you would later consume in the release process
5. read 3 and 4.