Azure DevOps

 What is Azure DevOps Server?

Azure DevOps Server is a Microsoft product that provides version control, reporting, requirements management, project management, automated builds, testing and release management capabilities. It covers the entire application life-cycle, and enables DevOps capabilities.

Developers can work in the cloud using Azure DevOps Services or on-premises using Azure DevOps Server. Azure DevOps Server was formerly named Visual Studio Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps tool-chain for developing and deploying software.  It also integrates with most leading tools on the market and is a great option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain.

Benefits of Azure DevOps:

Azure DevOps provides DevOps teams with powerful tools.

• Flexibility: If your DevOps team doesn’t want or need the full suite of services, they can customize them independently.

• Timely Access to New Features: Every three weeks, DevOps users receive access to new features. No need to scramble around and wonder what’s new. These are not to be confused with upgrades

• No Upgrades to Worry About: Users need not worry about upgrading or patching up the tool-chain because the Azure DevOps is a SaaS product. Companies that run on a CI/CD model no longer need to slow things down for the sake of upgrading.

• Reliability: Azure DevOps is backed by 24 x7 support and a 99.9% SLA.

• It’s Platform-agnostic: DevOps is designed to run on any platform (Linux, macOS, and Windows) or language (e.g., Android, C/C++, Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, .Net, and iOS apps).

• It’s Cloud-agnostic: Azure DevOps works with AWS and GCP.

What Are the Features of Azure DevOps?

• Improved Source Control: Azure DevOps systems support two popular types of source control: Git (distributed) or Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC), which is a centralized, client-server system. You can add and manage Azure Git tags, review, download, and edit files to see change history.

• Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD): Many developers employ the practice of CI/CD, and Azure DevOps supports them. By using Azure pipelines, developers can automate many of the design processes, including defining builds and their steps, creating test instructions, and manage simultaneous releases.

• Support for Manual and Exploratory Testing: Azure DevOps’ test features facilitate manual, exploratory, and continuous testing, including workflow customization, end-to-end traceability, criteria-based selection, and real-time charts that track test activity.

• Azure Cloud-hosted Services: Azure provides DevOps teams with cloud-hosted services that support application development and deployment. These services can be used by themselves or in combination with Azure DevOps.

• Plan and Track Your Work: Azure DevOps systems provide you with a couple of types of work items used to monitor features, requirements, user stories, tasks, bugs, and more. For planning purposes, you can access several kinds of backlogs and boards to support the main agile methods: Scrum, Scrumban, or Kanban. You can add and update relevant work items, manage product backlog, use sprint backlogs to plan sprints, and use Kanban boards to visualize the workflow and update statuses.

• Dashboard Control: Using the DevOps dashboard feature, you can quickly navigate to different areas of the project, add and manage dashboards, and configure dashboard widgets. 

• Azure Artifacts: Azure Artifacts allows teams to share Maven, npm, and NuGet packages from public and private sources and integrate package sharing into your CI/CD pipelines.