Azure DevOps is a language, platform and cloud provider agnostic DevOps toolchain and orchestration platform from Microsoft. Is it right for your team?
Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. It also integrates with most leading tools on the market and is a great option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain. At DevOpsGroup, we have lots of customers who have found Azure DevOps fits their needs irrespective of their language, platform or cloud.
Azure DevOps comprises a range of services covering the full development life-cycle. At the time of writing these are:
Azure DevOps can also be used to orchestrate third-party tools.
Despite being launched in October 2018, Azure DevOps is not the new kid on the DevOps block. Its lineage can be traced all the way back to Visual Studio Team System which was launched in 2006. This is a mature product with a rich feature-set that has over 80,000 internal users at Microsoft.
One of the things that we really like about Azure DevOps is how flexible it is. It’s extensible (via a Marketplace) and flexible enough to leverage your existing tools. For example, if you wanted to use Azure Resource Manager for infrastructure as code you can, but equally you can provision and manage Azure infrastructure using third-party tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Terraform.
Azure Devops is not focussed at organisations that are end-to-end Microsoft or Windows. Azure DevOps provides a platform that is:
As a SaaS offering, Azure DevOps is reliable, scalable and globally available. It is also backed by an SLA of 99.9% uptime and by 24×7 support.
Azure DevOps users get access to new features every 3 weeks. Microsoft is transparent, have published the product roadmap and are committed to rapidly iterating on the feature-set.
For organisations running on-premises CI/CD tooling, upgrades are a regular headache. By moving to a SaaS model, you no longer need to worry about patching and upgrading the toolchain.
Azure DevOps is a mature, feature-rich platform. The flexibility of supported languages, platforms and cloud vendors make it a viable option for a huge range of organisations. However, if you’re currently running an on-premises Team Foundation Server moving to Azure DevOps would be a natural upgrade for you.
Find out how to get started on your TFS to Azure DevOps migration.
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