Today Microsoft announced that Visual Studio Team Services will be known as Azure DevOps. This is more than just a rename. This shows the strong alignment between Azure and DevOps, and you will surely see even more amazing tools and capabilities that will help you take advantage of Azure as a way to enable your team’s agility. This announcement is really exciting for us here at Nebbia, as we typically tell our customers: We don’t believe that you can be successful with Azure unless you have a strong DevOps practice in place, and Azure DevOps is our tool of choice to help you with that. You can access Azure DevOps at https://dev.azure.com. You can get more information at aka.ms/azurevsts
So what’s part of Azure DevOps?
Azure Boards: Deliver value to your users faster using proven agile tools to plan, track, and discuss work across your teams. You can use Kanban boards, backlogs, dashboards, and reporting to follow your idea all the way to production.
Azure Pipelines: Build, test, and deploy with CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any other Git provider and deploy continuously. Azure Pipelines provides you with Cloud-hosted pipelines for Linux, Windows and macOS, with unlimited minutes for open source, including free unlimited build minutes for public projects. Additionally, if you have a private, non-open source repo, you now get 1,800 free build minutes! That is up from 240 minutes. And since Azure Pipelines are also now available to any developer from the GitHub marketplace, you have a great way to continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform and cloud!
Azure Repos: Get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos and collaborate to build better code with pull requests and advanced file management. If your team is into centralized version control, you can use Team Foundation Version Control.
Azure Test Plans: Test and ship with confidence using manual and exploratory testing tools. These tools let you get end-to-end traceability and track and assess quality throughout your software lifecycle, helping your team to build quality into the process rather than treating quality as an afterthought.
Azure Artifacts: Create, host, and share packages with your team, and add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with a single click. This includes support for Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.
You can pick which services are used by your team. So if your team only uses Azure Boards, then you can just turn that on, same with all the other services. Each Azure DevOps service is open and extensible. They work great for any type of application regardless of the framework, platform, or cloud. You can use them together for a full DevOps solution or with other services. If you want to use Azure Pipelines to build and test a Node service from a repo in GitHub and deploy it to a container in AWS, go for it. Azure DevOps supports both public and private cloud configurations. Run them in our cloud or in your own data center. No need to purchase different licenses
So if I am already in VSTS, how will this affect my account? Your can still access your projects at https://yourcompany.visualstudio.com, and you can also access it with the new URL of https://dev.azure.com/yourcompany. All new accounts will be created with the new URL scheme https://dev.azure.com/yourcompany.
You can get pricing details at https://azure.com/pricing/details/devops/. If you are an Open Source Project or Small Team (up to 5 users), you can get the functionality for free, with Open Source projects getting unlimited users and build time.
Here at Nebbia, we can help you and your team implement and succeed with Azure DevOps, whether you are looking to learn how to take advantage of Boards, Pipelines, Repos, Test Plans, or Artifacts, we have experts available to guide you to a successful implementation!
DevOps and Azure – now even closer together!
