MICROSOFT AZURE DEVOPS SERVICES PUTS DEVOPS IN THE CLOUD

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Microsoft has launched its Azure Devops platform, featuring a set of cloud-hosted services including CI/CD, testing, and kanban project boards. It is free for open source projects and for teams of five or fewer people; use by larger teams starts at $3 per user per month, with discounts.

Azure Devops works with any language, targeting any platform, with extensible services.

Azure Devops services include:

  • Azure Pipelines, offering CI/CD that can work with multiple languages and connecting to GitHub. Code can be pulled from popular source-control systems. Hosted MacOS, Linux, and Windows build agents are offered. Also, integration with Visual Studio App Center enables mobile deployments. Artifacts can be pulled from other CI systems such as Jenkins.
  • Azure Boards, to track work with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting. Work can be tracked across teams.
  • Azure Artifacts, providing Maven, NPM, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources, for hosting and sharing packages with a team.
  • Azure Repos, with unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos, enabling collaborative pull requests, file management, and code searching. Comments can be left for pull requests.
  • Azure Test Plans, featuring a manual and exploratory testing toolkit. Tests can be managed across platforms and configurations.

Public and private cloud configurations are supported. Developers, for example, could use Azure Pipelies to build and test a Node service from a GitHub repo and deploy it to a container in Amazon Web Services.

Azure Devops replaces Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), the cloud-based companion to the company’s Team Foundation Server (TFS) application life cycle management platform. Users of VSTS will be moved into Azure Devops projects automatically, still receiving end-to-end traceability and integration.

Azure Devops provided an updated user experience, leveraging the Fluent design language and including navigation improvements. Users will begin to see changes showing up, such as URLs changing from abc.visualstudio.com to dev.azure.com/abc.

Users of the on-premises TFS will keep receiving updates based on features live in Azure Devops. But the product’s name will be changed to Azure Devops Server.