With greater emphasis placed on automating the creation of predictable software bundles, you may be asking what are DevOps artifacts and what can you do with them? Well, it turns out you can do many things with them. Artifacts can be the compiled output for your app deployment, or a Nuget or NPM package ready to be pushed to a private (or public) registry; sometimes they can just be a place for temporary storage before becoming the input of another job in the pipeline.

Understanding your pipeline artifacts will help your CI builds become more predictable and possibly shrink the time it takes your pipelines to complete. Using Azure Pipelines as our CI tool, you'll learn the different uses for build artifacts, where they are stored, how they integrate with your deployments and unit tests, and how to compose your pipeline to make the best use of intermediate artifacts.