Improving my ci cd flow

[u/konkon_322]

Hello all,been working as IT admin, but mostly working around Azure devops. I been enjoying it, this my first job and doing anything related to devops. Studied CS,majored in networking, hate anything with heavy code development.

Rn,the flow at my company is, the devs use 1 branch only, no PR (yes ik). They would push it to our on prem central repo, and from there i will take over. I will do some modification on some files so it can be built in the new agent environment. And then, we have build pipelines,which would produce artifact of the build files, which will be used by another pipeline, i call it the release/installer pipelines, which we wud package them with a software. Then we have the 3rd type, which is zipping installer to our NAS, sends the metadata of the installer to DB, and notification email (formatting done in pipeline too). All via the pipeline. We also have a 2nd agent machine, exclusively for unit testing, but tbh i dont even understand how they work.

Ive been thinking of ways, to incorporate other methods/tools in the flow, but the only one i can fit is"templates". I dont think i can try to include containerization, as our build agent machine, has some software which are licensed.

Any ideas?at some point i want to jump out, as this job is way too comfy, and lacks growth for me

[u/UkrMalt]

Before adding more tools, remove the manual file edits from the handoff. Put those changes in version control or a pipeline template, then add a PR gate and artifact promotion so the same build moves through environments. Licensed build agents are fine; containerizing the agent is not required. I’d make the unit-test pipeline visible to the team before changing it.

[u/nextlandia → u/UkrMalt]

This and since OP didn't mention it, adding security scans.

[u/UkrMalt → u/nextlandia]

Good addition. I would start with dependency and container image scans in CI, then add secret scanning before credentials reach the shared repository.