Today I’m excited to talk about a feature in Azure that gives you continuous integration and deployment using Azure Data Factory. This is an Azure Data Factory visual interface that allows you to export any of your Data Factory components as an Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template.
When you do these exports from your Data Factory, it will generate 2 files. The template file, which will contain all the Data Factory metadata for the pipelines, data sets, etc., as well as a configuration file, which will contain environment parameters that will be different for each of your environments. So, if you’re going to create a development, a test and a production environment, each one will be different.
You also can specify things like storage containers, Databricks clusters, etc. After you’ve deployed this, you’re going to create a new factory for your environment. You’re also going to associate your Visual Studio team services get repository to that Data Factory, enabling source control versioning and collaboration uses.
Next, you’ll set up your Data Factory with VSTS. This is where all the developers can author data factory resources, such as pipelines, data sets and other components. Once you have this development area set up, developers can modify the resources and debug them right in the interface, along with checking performance. They’ll also have the option to create a PR from their branch to master or create a collaborative branch to get the changes reviewed by peers.
Once they are satisfied with the changes and are ready to go to production, they set it in the master branch and can then publish it to the development Data Factory. Or they can promote each of those environments through exporting those ARM templates when they’re ready from the master branch, or any other branch.
So, you export the template and it gets deployed with different environment parameters to test and production environments. From there, you can also set up VSTS release definitions to automate the deployment of your Data Factory to multiple environments.
The benefit with this is it opens the opportunity to bring your true dev test and production environments, that you’re used to in your local environment using SSIS or other ETL tools, to Azure. This tool offers a tremendous amount of power and it’s getting better all the time.
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