Azure DevOps Pipelines: Practices for Scaling Templates

This article discusses best practices for leveraging a single repository consisting of YAML templates in Azure DevOps Pipelines. The objective is to create a structure that allows for the creation of a task, job, stage, or variable template once and enables all pipelines to reuse the code. The intended outcomes include reducing pipeline creation time, easing maintenance of pipelines, providing an extra layer of security for pipeline creation, and ensuring consistent deployment of various apps.

To implement this structure, it is important to understand the template expansion process in YAML pipelines. When a pipeline runs, all YAML templates and associated files are collected and expanded into a single file called azure-pipeline-expanded.yml. This file can be downloaded after job completion and is helpful for architecture and troubleshooting purposes.

To store templates in a central location, it is recommended to use a dedicated Git repository. Azure DevOps pipelines support this functionality through the resources block. Storing templates in a separate repository offers the following benefits: all pipelines can retrieve templates from one consolidated location, an additional layer of security can be applied to the repository, and updates to the templates can be managed separately from the pipelines.

For more details on Azure DevOps pipelines and template scaling, refer to the full blog post.