Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

toxicbakery.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 197 posts

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#131

Post by toxicbakery »

vtbassmatt wrote: post #117
manigandham wrote: post #77

VM Agent based builds are an obsolete model. A docker/container-based pipeline is the current state of the art and allows for very fast builds with caching built in and isolated stages with narrow responsibilities.

We offer container jobs [1] and recently added the ability to use service containers [2] as well. Disclosure: I'm a PM for Azure Pipelines. [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/process/co... [2] https://docs.microsoft.com/azure/devops/pipelines/process/se...

Funny enough I had not had the time to write about this yet. This resolves one of the other issues on my list. Thank you.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#132

Post by toxicbakery »

whatupmd wrote: post #110

Sounds mostly like networking problems with the Azure Cloud.

I initially thought the same thing but I'm less convinced of that after trying an aws based build agent. I think the agents themselves may have a bug that combined with our pipeline needs, triggers some perfect storm issue. At the same time, we have seen builds fail to start at all and and sometimes fail to even checkout from GitHub.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#133

Post by ryanackley »

Came here to say that I've been impressed with Azure DevOps so far. We don't have the same requirements as the Author. For example, we don't deploy artifacts to a dependency management system and we don't build on Linux.

I have small complaints here and there but I couldn't find another build service that has Windows and OS X agents for anywhere near what Microsoft charges.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#134

Post by giaour »

sandGorgon wrote: post #104
elmalto wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Azure DevOps extensively at my work and, after having used GitHub, Gitlab, self hosted solutions, Jenkins, TeamCity... DevOps ranks dead last. It's the entire experience. The UI is terribly clunky everywhere. The worst for me are pull requests. Incredibly tough to work with people on a pull request. I can't even point you to "a" particular problem - for us it's broken everywhere. From the weird file comparison…

Same here. Azure has a killer feature in India that neither AWS or Google have - multiple data centres. Because of Indian data residency guidelines, that becomes critical for business continuity planning. But the Azure UI is so bad that people are willing to forego stuff like that just to avoid being on Azure. The Azure product teams have asked for feedback from startup multiple times with consistent answers on UI -…

AWS has a full region based in Mumbai (ap-south-1) with multiple availability zones, each of which consists of multiple data centers.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#135

Post by [deleted] »

vezycash wrote: post #71
withinrafael wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows Development MVP here. I feel like I must shoulder some of the responsibility here for not being louder about these issues. But must say, I'm disappointed to hear you're "surprised" about the UX issues. I've been telling your folks the UX is dreadful (e.g. as far back as pre-launch) and kept hearing back "we know, we're fixing it". I'll start formalizing the feedback and push it through the pipes, stay tuned.…

Here's my experience with Microsoft. I believe their feedback mechanisms are placebo, pacifiers for loud people. Microsoft pesters you to give feedback and works hard to ignore them. And then goes ahead with what they initially planned. At the end, they'll announce - "We had delivered what you wanted. Based on feedback..." And then you start wondering if you're in the minority and other people are simply crazy until…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#136

Post by toxicbakery »

stevenacreman wrote: post #128
chrisrpatterson wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really hate to hear you are having such a bad experience. The engineering manager has reached out on Twitter and included me. I would love to see what I can do to help

I personally don't really understand this approach. In fact, this approach annoys me. In this situation I feel like the product has already wasted my time and now people are contacting me to waste more of my time. The blog is really detailed and includes screenshots. You could fix the obvious issues and then follow up with an update once it's released.

In the opening paragraphs I stated it was my hope that this gives me a gateway to communicate with someone that isn't support and isn't the void that is their robot response issue tracker.

That said, they generously reached out to me and appear to genuinely be concerned by my experience. I plan to keep posting as I run into issues and also as they correct my mistakes and also solve my problems.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#137

Post by folbec »

ethomson wrote: post #12

PM for Azure DevOps here. We've been investing heavily in our user experience and our CI/CD experience, so I'm sad to see that we've disappointed here. Some of these complaints I would agree with - in particularly, we're not (yet) caching build resources - though we're working on this now. But most of these complaints I was quite surprised to hear; not an experience I would want someone to have or what I see from the…

One thing I can certainly agree with is the "no horizontal scrolling" beef.

I have a 4K laptop, evan on high res, the lack of horizontal scrolling in Azure portal and other Azure tools is a dailly irritant.

Stop trying to badly emulate Android phone look & feel ... for desktop usage !!!

We are professionals, we can handle scrollbars without screwing up.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#138

Post by alkonaut »

There were some enormous UX issues with the old look & feel of TFS/VSTS as well. Navigation was nearly impossible to understand, for example.

While I appreciate the work they put into DevOps, it still feels like the same person that designed the Azure Portal UI has had a say in the UI redesign of TFS into DevOps and that must either mean that a) Microsoft never realized what a horrible UX the Azure portal is, or b) they do realize but they are too invested in this new "design language" to do anything, so instead DevOps adopted the same style as Azure.

I'm in the process of migrating TO DevOps (on prem) so obviously I have a keen interest in the direction its taking. Build pipelines being declarative, navigation being clean up etc. are fantastic improvements. But it still feels clunky to use, especially around the backlogs/boards.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#139

Post by patrickg_zill »

Annatar wrote: post #88

I'm genuinely curious: what exactly is so hard about installing and system administering one's own servers inhouse that so many people would put up with these complications?

There isn't any true difficulty; people are running multiple sites that could all fit into 1 dedicated 64gb RAM server from Hetzner on a different infrastructure that allows them to develop their resume...

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#140

Post by geggam »

mscasts wrote: post #96
mattbillenstein wrote: post #64

How do all of you people get on this broken stuff on Azure with GCP and AWS (I think) being so good? Is it like free credits?

1. I don't use Google products if there is any other choice. 2. I think Azure is better overall than AWS. It's way easier to grasp the different features, while I haven't used Azure Devops, I've had little issues with the rest.

What is your scale and how do you implement automation ?
Post reply on HN