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Introducing Azure DevOps

azure.microsoft.com

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Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#11

Post by ethomson »

solatic wrote: post #6
ethomson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If the point of the rebranding is to help drive adoption of the individual components of what used to make up VSTS, then it seems to me like the strategy is to try and get people to switch from pre-existing toolsets to Azure tooling. Maybe it would be more persuasive if you could show some kind of comparison or case study for switching? For instance, if you want to make it easier for people to adopt Azure Boards, the…

You're right that we need to provide some better comparisons here, but the big reason that I'm excited about making individual components easier to adopt isn't for competition, it's to help people round out what they're missing in a dev tools stack.

There's a lot of shops that are happy with their git hosting provider and their agile planning tool and go looking for a CI/CD tool and may have been turned off by VSTS because it looked like a monolith. Making it clear that you can just use Azure Pipelines without having to use the entire stack was a priority for us, but you're absolutely right that we need to round this out with some better case studies. Thanks for the feedback.

Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#12

Post by 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.

Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#14

Post by smudgymcscmudge »

jbigelow76 wrote: post #12

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.

> But what happens when if the DevOps concept turns out to be a fad?

Time to re-rebrand

Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#15

Post by solatic »

ethomson wrote: post #11
solatic wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the point of the rebranding is to help drive adoption of the individual components of what used to make up VSTS, then it seems to me like the strategy is to try and get people to switch from pre-existing toolsets to Azure tooling. Maybe it would be more persuasive if you could show some kind of comparison or case study for switching? For instance, if you want to make it easier for people to adopt Azure Boards, the…

You're right that we need to provide some better comparisons here, but the big reason that I'm excited about making individual components easier to adopt isn't for competition, it's to help people round out what they're missing in a dev tools stack. There's a lot of shops that are happy with their git hosting provider and their agile planning tool and go looking for a CI/CD tool and may have been turned off by VSTS b…

Yeah that would be a good start. There's clear value-add here for on-prem teams which are starting to move to the cloud, by making it easier to run builds both on Azure and on-prem (seeing the $15/month pricing per agent) from the same cloud-based product, which I don't think anybody else is doing yet? But there doesn't seem to be any documentation about how to get that set up?

It would definitely help to see comparisons against competition, e.g. GitLab, CircleCI

Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#16

Post by tootie »

dsr_ wrote: post #7

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.

It makes almost no sense for a tech platform to be a DevOps tool. It's like saying saying a programming language is better at supporting agile. DevOps is a matter of how you assign responsibility to people in your org. Not how they get there.

Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#18

Post by ethomson »

solatic wrote: post #15
ethomson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right that we need to provide some better comparisons here, but the big reason that I'm excited about making individual components easier to adopt isn't for competition, it's to help people round out what they're missing in a dev tools stack. There's a lot of shops that are happy with their git hosting provider and their agile planning tool and go looking for a CI/CD tool and may have been turned off by VSTS b…

Yeah that would be a good start. There's clear value-add here for on-prem teams which are starting to move to the cloud, by making it easier to run builds both on Azure and on-prem (seeing the $15/month pricing per agent) from the same cloud-based product, which I don't think anybody else is doing yet? But there doesn't seem to be any documentation about how to get that set up? It would definitely help to see compari…

Yeah - the hybrid cloud and on-premises build agents is actually one of my favorite features. The open source project that I help maintain (libgit2) uses VSTS's hosted Linux, Windows and macOS build agents, but add support for some other platforms (like ARM) with on-premises build agents.

("On-premises build agents" makes it sound fancier than it is, it's actually Raspberry Pi's on my desk, but hey, whatever works, right?)

Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#19

Post by chrisrpatterson »

smudgymcscmudge wrote: post #14
jbigelow76 wrote: post #12

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.

> But what happens when if the DevOps concept turns out to be a fad? Time to re-rebrand

[PM on the Azure Pipelines team] The primary focus here is making the individual services easier for teams to adopt. Azure pipelines for CI/CD, Azure Boards for planning, etc. Those services support the overall goal of improving your DevOps practices.

Re: Introducing Azure DevOps

#20

Post by TeMPOraL »

dsr_ wrote: post #7

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.

> "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"

This description has enough wiggle room that you could sail an aircraft carrier through it. I don't think there can be a short term to describe all that and stay meaningful; the term "devops" itself has always been quite fuzzy, and every person you'd ask would explain it differently.

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