
Introducing Azure DevOps - dstaheli
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-azure-devops/
======
Someone1234
I wonder if Azure DevOps will have a day long outage like VSTS had last week?
That had a legitimately productivity cost to a lot of companies, and the more
vested in the VSTS toolchain you were the harder hit you were.

I'm legitimately surprised they're launching this so soon after that,
particularly considering there's been no real post-mortem, and no update on
how they'll stop this happening again.

"It is Azure's fault" isn't an answer, and re-branding this Azure DevOps makes
that excuse almost hilarious. I'm well aware that Azure AD was down, and that
VSTS has a strong dependency on it, but ultimately we're still talking about a
single data center bringing down VSTS for all of North America for an entire
work-day.

It has been a week and now they're trying to encourage you to push your whole
deployment toolchain (manage, build, test) into their cloud.

~~~
ethomson
I certainly hope not. I'm not going to argue that this was anything but a
disappointment to our customers - and one that we're eager to prevent from
happening again.

But we have never said that this was Azure's fault. It wasn't. We've put the
blame where it belongs: on us. We're nearly done writing up the root cause
analysis and an analysis of our next steps to prevent this from happening in
the future.

~~~
GordonS
3 weeks ago there was a different outage that meant no hosted build agents
were working in the west europe region, and it lasted for more than 24 hours.

Now, what I hated the most about this was the communication - there wasn't
any. Why not email impacted users to let them know you're aware and working on
a fix?

~~~
ethomson
You can subscribe to get emails for availability incidents on our service
availability blog,
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/)
(it's in the right-hand sidebar).

~~~
GordonS
Huh, I hadn't noticed that - I've subscribed now.

I do still think it would be better if you proactively sent out emails only to
affected customers though.

------
SamuelAdams
Is this just a rebranding?

As a long time user of VSTS, I am failing to see how Azure DevOps is different
from VSTS. Boards, CI/CD, testing - that's already part of VSTS, and has been
for quite some time. Is Microsoft just rebranding for keyword searching or
something? Or are there actual technical changes / new features that are being
introduced?

~~~
ethomson
PM for Azure DevOps here (formerly VSTS). It is a rebranding, but it's more
than merely a rebranding. We're breaking out the individual services so that
they're easier to adopt. For example, if you're just interested in pipelines,
you can adopt only pipelines.

We've got some neat new features launching today and more coming soon. My
favorite new feature is the Azure Pipelines app the the GitHub Marketplace. It
makes it one-click to build a continuous integration and pull request
validation pipeline right from your GitHub repository, you don't even need an
Azure DevOps account to get started.

~~~
digtal11
As a mostly very satisfied user, I gotta say, y'all have a great product. The
CI/CD part of VSTS (I like the old name better :P) is killer and by far my
favorite platform to use now. However, I've had my builds break twice out of
nowhere with no recourse other than submitting a forum post and hoping someone
gets back to me in a reasonable amount of time. I can't imagine going back to
another platform, but its really frustrating when your production release
process for a client is completely down and you have no way to fix it. Is
there a way to get better support in those scenarios?

~~~
GordonS
Another (mostly) happy VSTS user here, also loving the CI/CD functionality.

I too have had builds break recently out of nowhere:

1\. Related to NPM being upgraded on the hosted agent, which was fixed easily
enough (after trawling through logs) by forcing the task to use an older
version

2\. SQL LocalDB connections stopped working, so integration tests couldn't run
- this lasted for around _2 weeks_!

I also ended up on the Microsoft support forums... unfortunately, responses on
those forums from Microsoft staff are invariably late and of _infuriatingly_
poor quality.

I ended up on the VSTS Agent image GitHub site instead, and raising an issue
there was far more helpful.

VSTS is a great product, I just _really_ wish there was a decent support
option for when things go wrong.

I also wish Microsoft would actively communicate with impacted customers to
notify them where there are outages.

Oh, and I wish the hosted build agents ran on better hardware - they are slow,
even compared to the smaller Azure VMs. For example, we have a build that
takes 14 minutes on the (paid) hosted agent, or 3 minutes on a B2ms Azure VM.
Some of that is down to NPM and Nuget package caching, but even the actual
msbuild and test stages are much slower.

~~~
ethomson
I'm glad you're mostly happy, but I'm sorry it's only mostly. I hope that
we'll improve this. Honestly, the lowest latency mechanism is to hit
@AzureDevOps up on twitter (or me personally) and we'll make sure that your
problems get routed to the right person.

For outages, you can subscribe at
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice)
(in the toolbar on the right hand side). We don't send out email notifications
without you opting in, nor will we, but we do have some ideas to improve the
way we notify people that we're working on.

And as for build agents, we're working on that, especially around the caching.
Appreciate all the feedback.

------
dsr_
The term "DevOps" is now meaningless. The search for a new short term to
describe "operations and development teams working together using high quality
software tools to define, automate and distribute configuration and management
information, integrating QA, release management and security" has begun.

~~~
bovermyer
The discipline broadly described as "DevOps engineering" is just a way for
employers to get senior staff to do the work that really should be handled by
multiple, narrower disciplines (e.g., security engineers, automation
engineers, tooling engineers, etc.) for a lower cost.

~~~
dsr_
Perhaps you would re-read what I wrote? I didn't suggest that people should
add more hats -- I suggested that people should cooperate more, and learn from
each other.

It makes no sense to have a security policy and an implementation of that
policy and not have it be automatically distributed and applied, for instance.
And security implementations should be tested just as much as any other code.

------
jbigelow76
Eh, not a big fan of this, but if it's a just a rebrand no big deal I guess.
But what happens when if the DevOps concept turns out to be a fad? Visual
Studio has such a positive and strong brand association among .Net developers
it seems a shame to jettison it but I suppose it's necessary as MS is trying
to convince other stacks to use the Azure DevOps(VSTS) CI/CD pipelines.

~~~
partiallypro
Just drop the "dev" and call it AzureOps. Still way less confusing than the
prior branding.

~~~
jbigelow76
AzureOps has a nice ring to it! With regards to VSTS, I probably just have a
soft spot for Visual Studio itself.

~~~
ethomson
I love Visual Studio, but the product currently known as Azure DevOps
(formerly known as VSTS) really has nothing to do with Visual Studio.

The name made a lot more sense back in the day when the premier client was
actually the Visual Studio IDE. But today, most people interact with Azure
DevOps with their browser and too many people think "Visual Studio Team
Services" is a web-based IDE.

The name change is bittersweet. We've been "Visual Studio <something>" since
the first release of our on-premises product, well over a decade ago. But I'm
confident about this next phase of Azure DevOps.

~~~
partiallypro
VSTS naming was a complaint I heard all the way back at Build 2016. Everyone
at the Build booth was confused, and even the people manning the booth said
the name was confusing. So...it took long enough.

------
sorrymate
I've been impressed by the ease of use for VSTS. We've adopted it for our
team, and it has really reduced the friction in our CI/CD pipeline. We've been
able to automate the entire process. It seemed to be easy to setup because
there is a Task for just about anything you want to do. Shout out to the Azure
DevOps (VSTS/TFS) team. Keep it up, nice work!

------
2-m3m3n70
I'd like to point out that it appears their Pipelines is the only hosted CI
tool on the market that supports every platform. Are there any others?

~~~
joshschreuder
What do you mean by supports every platform?

There are a bunch of CI tools (Jenkins, Travis, etc.) that offer either hosted
service that work everywhere, or on-prem which can be installed on every major
platform.

~~~
2-m3m3n70
I mean that the hosted build environment supports every platform (Windows,
Mac, Linux).

Travis for instance only supports Mac and Linux. Circle CI supports Mac and
Linux. Appveyor supports Windows and Linux.

Other tools like Jenkins or Buildkite can be installed anywhere but you have
manage the build servers.

------
all_usernames
"Implement continuous delivery (CD) of your software to any cloud, including
Azure, AWS, and GCP."

Interesting move!

~~~
LyalinDotCom
Azure DevOps has been built with an open eco-system that enables other to
plug-in their products in our stack, for example AWS has their tools for VSTS
(our former name):
[https://aws.amazon.com/vsts/](https://aws.amazon.com/vsts/)

------
styfle
How many times has this thing been re-branded?

1\. Team Foundation Server (TFS)

2\. Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)

3\. Azure DevOps

Imagine if GitHub renamed itself every few years?

Or is the idea that this is going to be marketed towards Azure users and
GitHub will be promoted to the new VSTS once it gets a few more features for
project management and PRs?

[https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1032702016064286720](https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1032702016064286720)

~~~
data_ders
you forgot that last year it was called VSO (Visual Studio Online)

------
GordonS
I've been using VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) for a few years now, and I
think it's great.

But this looks like they've just changed the URL and stuck the name "Azure
DevOps" onto the VSTS site? Even the pricing and plans seem to be the same - I
really don't get how they're talking like they're launching something new,
rather than just having a rebranding exercise after buying GitHub.

~~~
manigandham
That's exactly what it is: [https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/team-
services/](https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/team-services/)

Although there have been slight tweaks and UI/UX updates.

~~~
GordonS
There have already been quite a lot of UI/UX updates over the past 6 months of
so. TBH, I kind of wish you'd leave it the hell alone for a bit!

In particular, I'm not a fan of the most recent changes to the 'build and
release' pages. To edit the build pipeline, the edit link is at the top of the
list of builds, rather than at the top of the list of build pipelines... I end
up searching for the link every. single. time :(

~~~
manigandham
I don't work on it, you should reply to the PM on this page or reach them via
twitter/email to discuss further. Seems they are willing to listen:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953476](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953476)

------
ethomson
PM for Azure DevOps here. The team is really excited about this launch, and
many of us are here to answer questions on Azure DevOps, or any of the
individual services like Azure Pipelines, the new GitHub Marketplace app, or
our free build offer for open source projects.

~~~
manigandham
The VM based build agents are slow, especially compared to more modern CI/CD
systems that today use a Docker/container based approach for each build step,
along with a persistent store between each step.

Is something like this going to arrive soon?

~~~
vtbassmatt
[PM on Azure Pipelines here.]

We've just finished building the initial version of container jobs [1]. A job
groups up a number of steps -- we haven't yet decided if or how we should
implement container-per-step. I'd be interested in your thoughts and use
cases. In case I miss you here, my email is mattc@xbox.com.

[1]
[https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/process/co...](https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/process/container-
phases)

------
rjbwork
Still no Mercurial. _yawn_ Really sucks to see Microsoft giving up on us Hg
users, considering it was the only viable DVCS on windows for years until
people finally got git working with a bunch of issues.

~~~
manigandham
Considering how comparatively rare it is, it's unlikely to ever be supported
natively. Microsoft has invested a lot into git and now uses it for the
Windows codebase, which is the largest repo by several magnitudes.

~~~
rjbwork
I've somehow managed to work at 3 companies in a row that use Hg. I don't
think it's rare at all, or maybe I'm a statistical anamoly.

------
ianceicys
@ethomson Any word on this long standing feature request with the rebranding -
read the comment on the request, a simple update would be super helpful.

[https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-visual-
stud...](https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-visual-studio-team-
services/suggestions/2037613-make-it-possible-to-move-a-team-project-between-
te)

~~~
ethomson
This is not an area of the product that I work on, so I don't know what the
status is. Let me look into it.

------
deskamess
Can MSDN subscribers apply their credit towards this service?

~~~
tarekmadkour
No, they can't use their free Azure credits towards Azure DevOps.

Azure DevOps is free for teams of up to five users. It's also effectively free
for open source use by teams of any size. Larger teams working on private
projects would need to be on one of the paid tiers and can't use the free
Azure credits to pay for that.

~~~
ethomson
To clarify a bit: _Azure credits_ cannot be used to pay for Azure DevOps
subscriptions. So if you want another parallel pipeline, then you cannot use
Azure credits to pay for that.

However, Visual Studio subscribers do get licenses for Azure DevOps. If you're
a Visual Studio Professional subscriber, then you get a Basic license for
Azure DevOps. You get additional benefits if you're a Visual Studio Enterprise
subscriber. You can find the details at [https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/visualstudio/subscriptions/...](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-
us/visualstudio/subscriptions/vs-azure-devops)

------
itomato
A new velvet cushion filled with the same old sawdust and horsehair.

