Key points from the launch of Azure DevOps

Within the last 24 hours Microsoft has launched Azure DevOps. The platform that Microsoft has dubbed ‘VSTS reimagined’.  

A huge part of the launch is five new features that have been designed to work as a complete DevOps framework, separately with other services, and for any type of application regardless of framework, platform or cloud.  

There is plenty of information out there on what these features encompass, so we won’t go into too much detail here:  

• Azure Boards – use this to collaborate, plan, track and discuss 
• Azure Pipelines – use this to continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform or cloud 
• Azure Repos – use this for unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repos 
• Azure Test Plans – use this for planned exploratory testing 
• Azure Artifacts – use for this Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds 

If you want to find out more about what each feature is and does, read the release blog from Microsoft here. Complete with videos.  

The major thing to note is the integration possibilities that extend way beyond Azure, Microsoft aptly summarise its extent when they say: 

“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, got for it.”  

Azure DevOps really has been designed with the support of software development teams in mind, realising that development teams use a range of tools that aren’t just from Microsoft. Echoing the ethos that was expressed with Microsoft’s announced partnership with GitHub earlier in the year. There are also some benefits for open source projects; Azure Pipelines offers free CI/CD with unlimited minutes and 10 parallel jobs for every open source project. To make it even easier, Azure Pipelines is available in the GitHub marketplace.  

Microsoft have released a huge array of resources relating to the launch of Azure DevOps. We’ve listed the most useful below:  

An overview of Azure DevOps and what it means for existing VSTS users:  

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-devops/ 

Technical release notes on all the five new features:  

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/2018/sep-10-azure-devops-launch 

Links to watch the launch Keynote and join the interactive workshop later in September:  

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/community/events/devops/  

If you can’t make head nor tail of this new release, whether you’re a current user of VSTS or not, get in touch with us at Grey Matter and we can give you the highlights and help you figure out where to go from here.  

 Call us on +44 (0)1364 655181 or email developer@greymatter.com.