Microsoft recently announced Azure DevOps and an evolution of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) which is now called as Azure DevOps Services. All the VSTS users will be able to move or change to new URL and UI with ease. Instead of <your account name>. visualstudio.com you will be using dev.azure.com/<your account name> and off course the brand-new UI and with lots of new capabilities.

So, what is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps Services (formerly VSTS) is a cloud service for collaboration, task and defect tracking, source code management, build test and deployment. It provides an integrated set of features that you access through your web browser or IDE’s like Visual Studio Enterprise/Professional, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse through Team Explorer Everywhere, including the following:

• Azure Repos: Git repositories for source control of your code
• Azure Pipelines: Build and release services to support continuous integration and delivery of your apps
• Azure Boards: Agile tools to support planning and tracking your work, code defects, and issues using Kanban and Scrum methods
• Azure Test Plans: A variety of tools to test your apps, including manual/exploratory testing, load testing, and continuous testing
• Azure Artifacts: Fully integrated package management to your continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines with a single click
• And capabilities like highly customizable dashboards for sharing progress and trends. Built-in wiki for sharing information with your team
• In addition, the Azure DevOps ecosystem provides support for adding extensions, integrating with other popular services, such as: Slack, Trello, UserVoice, Azure DevOps (VSTS) Roll-Up, Copy Project, Copy Dashboard and more, and developing your own custom extensions.

Many of our services are either free for small teams or available through a subscription model or per-use model. You can exercise a hybrid approach where you use on-premises TFS to manage your code and work, and you purchase cloud build or testing services on an as-needed basis.

Azure DevOps Services can be used as a whole end-to-end platform right from requirements tracking, project management, source control, CI CD and test management. Or just use Azure pipelines for CI CD and have your code in GitHub or any other supported source control or other scenario will be use Azure DevOps Repo service for source code and perform CI CD from Jenkins or other deployment tool.

Azure DevOps Services and Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) both provide an integrated, collaborative environment that supports Git, continuous integration, and Agile tools for planning and tracking work.

Azure DevOps Services is the cloud offering that provides a scalable, reliable, and globally available hosted service. It is backed by a 99.9% SLA, monitored by our 24/7 operations team, and available in local data centers around the world. Whereas TFS is the on-premises offering that's built on a SQL Server as back end data storage system. Enterprises usually choose on-premises TFS when they need their data to stay within their network or when they want access to SharePoint sites and SQL Server reporting services that integrate with TFS data and tools.