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Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

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Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#21

Post by avinium »

markcubed wrote: post #2

While I certainly have had a few annoying issues myself, full credit to the team behind DevOps (nee VSTS) for doing an amazing job over the last >12 months to overhaul and improve the product. I have been impressed at the pace things are improving. I have not had the same issues with build machines disappearing into the ether (we use Windows hosts however) but definitely agree that the (lack of) caching is maddening.…

Yeah, this has been my experience.

I haven't had a build agent disappear, but lack of build caching is very frustrating. The hosted build agents are slow to begin with, let alone needing 5 minutes for every build to restore packages.

AFAIK there's no way to "only run changed tests" too.

EDIT: Forgot to add that, despite the above, I'm pretty happy with it. The whole VSTS experience (Wiki/code/PRs/etc) is pretty great, it's nice to have everything in a single place.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#22

Post by krob »

top-flight wrote: post #14
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…

Funny I got an email from an Azure PM after I stopped using the free tier asking if I ran into problems. I explained my issue and what I gave up on, and.... never heard a response. I thought that was kind of weird, why even ask?

They ask the question, but any response is prohibited unless they cycle it through a pr department. It's about public narrative, and how it changes sentiment. So unless that response pays them, it's better to avoid saying anything than saying the wrong thing and pissing someone off, especially the wrong influencer.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#23

Post by thejosh »

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…

Azure Devops is something I want to love.

The UI keeps changing, but doesn't fix underlying bugs that have been around for ages.

Multiple issues where the builds don't actually update in the browser when they go through the steps (f5 only fixes), the builds show out of order in the UI, and many many other wonky things.

Also releases aren't YAML yet. Builds are, and are a good feature.

Azure Devops is almost perfect, and with a bit of TLC would be excellent.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#24

Post by pthreadses »

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…

I can echo what the author of the blog says, save for private build instances, we haven’t had issues with them.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#25

Post by dmarlow »

I've yet to look, let alone try, Azure DevOps. There would have to be some compelling reasons to choose that over TeamCity, which I have had nothing but great and positive experiences with.

Any big reasons DevOps is something to consider, or is it mostly ideal for new projects?

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#26

Post by bluepanda »

krob wrote: post #22
top-flight wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny I got an email from an Azure PM after I stopped using the free tier asking if I ran into problems. I explained my issue and what I gave up on, and.... never heard a response. I thought that was kind of weird, why even ask?

They ask the question, but any response is prohibited unless they cycle it through a pr department. It's about public narrative, and how it changes sentiment. So unless that response pays them, it's better to avoid saying anything than saying the wrong thing and pissing someone off, especially the wrong influencer.

(Former Azure DevOps PM here) That's not quite true - did you hear that from someone? When I was there, I had pretty much full freedom to talk with customers, as long as they hadn't opted out of contact. Never had to talk to PR or have emails looked at.

Sorry that you didn't hear back though :(

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#27

Post by GiorgioG »

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…

The user experience leaves so much to be desired. The tools are not well integrated, the UI is really slow, there’s no dashboard view of active pull requests, builds, releases, etc for my favorite repos. Build/Deploy times are insanely slow for .NET Core micro service projects. We have a project with 4000 unit tests (not integration tests) and it takes over 7 minutes to do a full build + code coverage. The same operations locally take a fraction of the time.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#28

Post by matthewisabel »

Novashi wrote: post #16
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…

I dunno if you guys have gotten feedback on this, but the difference between build artifacts, artifact feeds, and the output of some pipelines' tasks in terms of artifacts is really confusing. I know it's probably getting translated to yaml from the old way which was a bunch of forms with build options, but we had some trouble with this. At the time, yaml releases were also still in development/preview mode. One thin…

Azure Pipelines PM here. Definitely hear you on the current YAML experience. We're working on updates to the editor now to allow you to quickly browse and insert task snippets. It's going to be a big improvement.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#29

Post by davewasthere »

Havoc wrote: post #3

wow that sounds pretty seriously broken. Has anybody else here actually used it & can comment?

I've helped a few clients migrate from whatever ad-hoc process they had to CI/CD with Azure Devops.

Apart from one minor issue with a bug in node.js timing when running the build server on burstable VMs (which is probably more to do with AWS setup than node), I've not had any issues that I can think of.

I don't have the problem with cache though, as I always run my own build servers/agents.

The UI has changed a few times over the past year, mostly around the rebrand from VSTS to Azure DevOps. But once learned, it's pretty straightforward and I'm sure I've barely touched the surface of its capabilities.

I, for one, am very impressed.

EDIT: oh, one improvement I can think of, would be to accept web-hooks rather than polling Bitbucket. But honestly, that's only a delay of a minute or two, so it's not a big deal. You could also easily enough create your own serverless webhook listener that triggers the build, so it's a bit of a non-issue, but I was surprised at the lack.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#30

Post by Someone1234 »

We use paid Azure DevOps for Source Control (although we're watching GitHub closely).

We tried to also use Azure Boards (Work Items, Boards, Backlogs, etc). Ouch. It is a complete UI mess of disjointed ideas. Instead of implementing one thing well, they implemented two dozen things terribly.

We actually migrated from Azure Boards to Office 365's Planner (KanBan) just because the UI wasn't so horrible. It is simple and gets out of your way. In fact O365's Planner, Teams, and OneNote Online products might be superior to anything Azure DevOps has produced.

The only nice thing I have to say about Azure DevOps Boards is that it integrates into Visual Studio, but frankly even that is barely passable. I'm predicting they scrap DevOps completely and just use GitHub as a clean slate.

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