Azure DevOps is rebranding of Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), which is the online version of Team Foundation Server. Here are some of the prime reasons as to why a customer should choose Azure DevOps. TFS is originally a source code management tool, which later became a platform, where development projects are managed, tested and released. As you implement and practice DevOps technologies, you will provide value to your customer faster in the form of new and innovative products and enhancements. DevOps automates and speeds software delivery. Azure offers end to end automated solution for DevOps that includes integrated security and monitoring. Azure DevOps captures over 15 years of investment and learning in providing tools to support software development teams. As a result, better products have been delivered faster making customers happy. Consequently, many more customers are opting for Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps includes:
- Azure Boards
- Azure Repos
- Azure Pipelines
- Azure Artifacts
Let us have a look at some of the benefits that the customers can reap, while they opt for Azure DevOps.
- Collaboration
Sharing is the basis of Azure DevOps. Being able to host and manage code centrally is the key to any organizational goal which may require optimization. Even though, the only code that the team holds are a collection of power shell or VB scripts, storing that same code in Azure DevOps will provide a central location from which to manage that code. Versioning code is a part of code management and irrespective of whether you want to use Team Foundation Version Control or GIT, Azure DevOps has it covered.
- Work Items
You can coordinate the management of your systems with work items. Work Items may refer to a server, a project risk or a system bug. A work item can be modeled using a process template around an agile framework (which work well for software development or the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which works well for systems integration. Work items helps to divide complex systems into manageable workloads.
- Integrity and Delivery
Azure DevOps is a robust platform for software driven organizations to deploy solutions in a pipeline allowing for continuous integration and deployment. Whether you are deploying a solution hosted in Azure or AWS, the Azure DevOps CICD pipeline can take the solution from development to delivery. The infrastructure-as-code can be incorporated into the pipeline so that the ambitious systems administrator can automate far reaching changes to their environments from a single location.
- Open Platform
Azure DevOps is responsible for integration with industry and community tools. It is far from the closed-off single vendor solution that was the early version of TFS. There is a marketplace, where hundreds of extensions are available; hence Azure has to do something out of the box. Actually, Microsoft has been very successful in promoting cooperation even with competitors. In the marketplace, you may come across integration extensions ranging from AWS to Slack to ServiceNow. The integration is done keeping the customer in mind. Azure DevOps is one of the many tools that you can bank on for managing code development needs.
- Becoming a Software Company
Though everyone may not be in the business of building software, but the industry trend is tilting towards the idea that “every company needs to be a software company” as said by Satya Nadella. In the quest to outperform and achieve differentiation, a new kind of business model – Cloud Operating Model has come into existence. The Cloud Operating Model (COM) seeks to bring business leaders and technology masters and teams together, to specify how a technology is implemented throughout a business. A successful company uses technology both as a defensive and offensive strategy. Building a Cloud Operating Model and making it the backbone of the organization’s IT infrastructure will evidently set every business on the right path. There needs to be much more communication and collaboration to achieve this purpose. As technical and non-technical people come together, there will be a mutual understanding of what is going on in each other’s mind.
Hence, an organization that follows all the DevOps practices creates the right culture, which finally gets the ending it deserves i.e. DevOps organization. Working with Azure DevOps will free up developers to focus on doing what they do best.
If you’re interested in learning & adopting a DevOps approach, you can reach us for further information.