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Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

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Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#71

Post by vezycash »

withinrafael wrote: post #65
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…

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 you see multiple complaints about the same things.

Their music app, Windows phone, Windows 10, Skype and Edge are where I experienced this. In all cases, user experience kept getting worse with each "IMPROVEMENT."

The only time Microsoft listens is when people ignore official feedback channels and there are massive outcries on many fronts. Even then, Microsoft often retreats only temporary.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#72

Post by throw_away2 »

kkarakk wrote: post #69
throw_away2 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only assume windows people are used to pain

pretty much it, also azure is slightly better at pricing in asia

This mimics the mac vs windows argument I had with my brother-in-law where it boiled down to the fact that you could run windows on something cheaper than a macbook. Even though in order to remap caps lock to something reasonable you have to edit the registry. In 2019. The best answer I think involves windows server 2003 resource kit and its UI, which is so old it could get a driver's license.

You save money but what kind of life is that?

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#73

Post by ToFab123 »

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…

Why can I only choose github as my repository when creating a new devops project? It used to be possible to use vsts (git)

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#74

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

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?

I'm only one person, and my team is only one team, but we have been completely satisfied with Azure and DevOps so far. But then again, we are a small team and tend towards many smaller projects rather than fewer large projects, so some of the issues mentioned here w/ caching and missing stats, for instance, may just not apply for us. We don't really need to see stats of how many pull requests each dev has made when there's only 4 of us doing backend work.

Additionally, we are a non-profit, and MS works with us in a moderately generous way with pricing, whereas AWS wouldn't.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#75

Post by manigandham »

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?

All of them have problems. The other 2 have nothing close to a devops product suite like this at all.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#78

Post by BuckRogers »

I use Azure DevOps everyday and like it quite a bit. It'll keep improving but I've had no complaints. Microsoft is in a very enviable position, not just having one of the best IDEs but having control over potentially an entire CI/CD pipeline from Github to Azure, while having one of the major programming platforms in .Net to enable best-in-class integration. No one else can really say they have all of that, not Atlassian, Oracle or Amazon.

The CI component, Azure Pipelines, is the only hosted CI tool that supports all major platforms, at a minimum Windows/macOS/Linux.

The value of essentially fully automating out the role of DevOps engineers is a long time coming, and I used to do that sort of work but saw the writing on the wall with things like Azure DevOps. I think a lot of existing DevOps roles will transition over time to 'Cloud Engineer', specializing in setting up and maintaining hosted CI/CD platforms. There will also be a lot less of them as a result. It's becoming a commodity, MS is just one player there. I love what they're doing and eagerly embrace it, Microsoft has been knocking it out of the park. It works well for us.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#79

Post by kekub »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #74
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?

I'm only one person, and my team is only one team, but we have been completely satisfied with Azure and DevOps so far. But then again, we are a small team and tend towards many smaller projects rather than fewer large projects, so some of the issues mentioned here w/ caching and missing stats, for instance, may just not apply for us. We don't really need to see stats of how many pull requests each dev has made when t…

I can only second that. Team of 10 with about 30 projects and Azure DevOps was the best that could happen to us. The only problem I saw in here is that the build ui does not automatically update sometimes. Another thing that annoyes me is that the tasks and stories do not update in realtime when you work on them from multiple machines.

Re: Microsoft’s Azure DevOps: An Unsatisfying Adventure

#80

Post by jsingleton »

MisterKent wrote: post #19
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 old UI was better, and forcing people to this weird pretty UI doesn't make sense. Several products aimed at tech people seem to make this mistake. We are power users, we don't want stuff hidden away. Stop having UX that's designed as if we were trying to browse twitter.

The new UI was useful when it was opt-in and we were migrating from on-prem TFS to what was then called VSTS. It made it easy to tell which system you were using.

I'm more used to the old UI but some features are not easily discoverable. I wrote some posts on how to build branches and pull requests as it's not obvious: https://unop.uk/build-and-release-all-pull-request-merge-res...

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