Microsoft today announced Azure DevOps, the successor of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) and Azure DevOps Server, the successor of Team Foundation Server (TFS). The included services “span the breadth of the development lifecycle to help developers ship software faster and with higher quality,” the company promises.
The rebranding is not exactly a surprise, given that VSTS is essentially a cloud service backed by Microsoft Azure. Each Azure DevOps service is open and extensible, designed to work with any type of application, regardless of the framework, platform, or cloud. Azure DevOps supports both public and private cloud configurations.
Above: A developer using all Azure DevOps services together from the vantage point of Azure Boards.
As for pricing, Azure DevOps is free for open source projects and small projects (up to five users). For larger teams, the cost ranges from $30 per month (10 users) to $6,150 per month (1,000 users).
Azure DevOps includes:
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- Azure Pipelines: CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any Git repository and deploy continuously. Azure Pipelines is also now available in the GitHub Marketplace.
- Azure Boards: Powerful work tracking with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting.
- Azure Artifacts: Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.
- Azure Repos: Unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repos for your project. Collaborative pull requests, advanced file management, and more.
- Azure Test Plans: All in one planned and exploratory testing solution.
It’s worth noting that Azure Pipelines offers free CI/CD with unlimited minutes and 10 parallel jobs for every open source project. Many of the top open source projects are already using Azure Pipelines for CI/CD, including Atom, Cpython, Pipenv, Tox, Visual Studio Code, and TypeScript.
Above: Azure Pipelines used independently to build a GitHub repo.
Microsoft says its “millions” of VSTS users will be upgraded into Azure DevOps projects automatically, and promises they will not lose any functionally. Instead, VSTS will gain more choice and control since Azure DevOps services “work great together.” That said, URLs will be changed from abc.visualstudio.com to dev.azure.com/abc, and redirects from visualstudio.com URLs will be supported to avoid broken links.
VSTS users will also receive an updated user experience, which Microsoft will continue to iterate on based on feedback from the preview. New users will get the update today, and it will be enabled by default for existing users “in the coming months.”
Users of TFS, the on-premises counterpart of VSTS, will continue to receive updates based on features live in Azure DevOps. Starting with the next version of TFS, the product will be called Azure DevOps Server and will receive the normal cadence of updates (new features have typically been added to VSTS first and then migrated to the on-premises TFS version as updates at approximately three-month intervals).
If you want to learn more, Microsoft is holding a live Azure DevOps keynote on September 11 at 8:00 a.m. Pacific and a workshop with Q&A on September 17 at 8:30 a.m. Pacific.
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