As a DevOps consulting company, we are often asked by our customers to provide them with guidance about tools that will help them improve their software development process.  Since we are a Microsoft DevOps partner and experts in Team Services, those conversations typically go in the direction on how Team Service and Azure can be used as part of a company’s DevOps transformation.  When working with teams that don’t use the Microsoft tools as their primary technology, at first Team Services looks like it would not be a very good fit.

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Here are a few reasons to look at Visual Studio Team Services as your DevOps platform, even if you are not a Microsoft-centric team:

  • Visual Studio Team Services simplifies continuous integration for your applications for all platforms and all languages.
  • VSTS allows you to link builds to test results, work items, code, and releases
  • VSTS’s build platform supports native builds on Windows, Mac, and Linux
  • VSTS has enterprise-level security built-in.  This allows you to manage access to your builds by defining groups and granting permissions for viewing, editing, creating, and queuing builds. You can manage and share build resources across projects. Control access to build resources (pools and queues). Audit changes to your builds.
  • Continuous Integration features in VSTS provide you the ability to create and manage build processes that automatically compile and test your applications in the cloud or on premises, either on demand or as part of an automated continuous integration strategy. You can build your TFVC, Git, and GitHub projects from a gallery of reusable open source and extensible build tasks that support Ant, Maven, Gradle, etc., and run JUnit, NUnit, xUnit, MSTest, Jasmine, and other types of test frameworks.
  • History and trends: Audit and compare the changes of your build definitions over time. View agent output logs in real-time as the build is running and download for deeper analysis.
  • Continuous Deployment: Use deployment templates to deploy your projects to on premises, hybrid, or cloud (Azure, AWS, Google, etc.) environments.
  • Get control of deployments: Manual or automated gates for approval workflows.  Enable sign-off for deployments using pre or post deployment approvals. Automatic notifications ensure collaboration and release visibility among team members.

There is no tool out there that implements DevOps on its own and you can’t just go out shopping for DevOps.  But a tool like Team Services, helps you enable practices that will lead you to achieve a better DevOps state.  Team Services is a set of Cloud-Optimized DevOps tools, and when you combine it with DevOps best practices, you are able to achieve continuous delivery and shorten your cycle time from Idea to Production.  No matter what your technology stack, VSTS can help your team collaborate, give your customers a say on backlog priorities, and align those priorities with the rest of the business.

A little about us: Nebbia Technology is a software company that specializes in Azure-based solutions and DevOps best practices. As a Microsoft Gold partner in both Cloud and Application Development, with every single developer and consultant Microsoft-certified, we are the DevOps experts to help your team get the most out of your tools and software development process. Let us guide you through your DevOps journey and help you shorten your cycle time to provide value to your customers more efficiently.