Microsoft Replacing Visual Studio Team Services with Azure DevOps -- Redmondmag.com

Microsoft Replacing Visual Studio Team Services with Azure DevOps

By David Ramel
09/10/2018

Microsoft announced on Monday that it is rebranding Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), the DevOps offering that has been a part of the Visual Studio IDE for years, to be the cloud-hosted "Azure DevOps."

VSTS users will automatically be upgraded to Azure DevOps projects, Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the change. The company emphasized that no functionality will be lost; instead, users should gain more choices and control of DevOps workflows.

All Azure DevOps services are open and extensible, working with all types of applications no matter the framework, platform or cloud, according to Microsoft. In this Channel 9 video that's embedded in the announcement, 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, Microsoft indicated: "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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