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Microsoft Evolves Visual Studio Team Services into Azure DevOps

Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), the familiar DevOps offering that has been incorporated into the Visual Studio IDE for years, has evolved into the cloud-hosted Azure DevOps, Microsoft announced today.

VSTS users will be upgraded into Azure DevOps projects automatically, said Microsoft, emphasizing that no functionality will be lost, but rather more choices and control of DevOps workflows gained.

And, in the "new" spirit of Microsoft, all Azure DevOps services are said to be open and extensible, reportedly working with all types of applications no matter the framework, platform or cloud. DevOps Manager Donovan Brown said they will "work for any language targeting any platform." And, envisioning a use case scenario that would have been unheard of not that long ago, today's announcement post said, "If you want to use Azure Pipelines to build and test a Node service from a repo in GitHub and deploy it to a container in AWS, go for it."

That Azure Pipelines service is also new, described as a CI/CD service for continuously building, testing and deploying projects to any platform or cloud, available in the GitHub Marketplace. Built-in cloud-hosted agents are available for Linux, macOS and Windows, with workflows enabled for native container support, and deployment options for Kubernetes, VMs and serverless environments.

Along with Azure Pipelines, other services provided by Azure DevOps include:

  • Azure Boards, for tracking work with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting.
  • Azure Artifacts, providing package feed for Apache Maven, npm and NuGet package from public and private sources.
  • Azure Repos, which are private Git repos, providing functionality such as collaborative pull requests and advanced file management.
  • Azure Test Plans, an "all-in-one planned and exploratory testing solution."

Pricing details for Azure DevOps are available here. Azure Pipelines CI/CD services are provided for free -- with unlimited minutes and accommodating up to 10 parallel jobs -- for any open source project.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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