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Introducing Azure DevOps
- SamuelAdams 8y agoIs this just a rebranding? As a long time user of VSTS, I am failing to see how Azure DevOps is different from VSTS. Boards, CI/CD, testing - that's already part of VSTS, and has been for quite some time. Is Microsoft just rebranding for keyword searching or something? Or are there actual technical changes / new features that are being introduced?
- flyingswift 8y agoThis is a rebranding yes. VSTS was a bad name that confused potential customers because they thought of the IDE, and so no one really knew what the product was from the name alone. (Work on VSTS team)
- GordonS 8y agoHah, long time TFS and VSTS user here - I recently got so annoyed with colleagues mis-using these acronymns that I sent out an email with a glossary of terms for TFS, VSTS, TFVC, VSO etc :)
- sunahe 8y agoTime to send a new one then
- styfle 8y agoWon't the new name confuse potential customers because they think of the Azure cloud for deployment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953823
- contextfree 8y agoit looks like rebrand + redesign + decoupling the individual services so they're easier to adopt independently?
- divyavaishnavi 8y agoYes that's right + free pipeline for OSS project. From: PM for Azure DevOps here (formerly VSTS)
- GordonS 8y agoHasn't there always been 1 free pipeline on the free plan, but there was a limit on the number of monthly build minutes? I'm nitpicking though, and I have to say, 10 concurrent jobs and unlimited build time is really generous.
- ethomson 8y agoPM for Azure DevOps here (formerly VSTS). It is a rebranding, but it's more than merely a rebranding. We're breaking out the individual services so that they're easier to adopt. For example, if you're just interested in pipelines, you can adopt only pipelines. We've got some neat new features launching today and more coming soon. My favorite new feature is the Azure Pipelines app the the GitHub Marketplace. It makes it one-click to build a continuous integration and pull request validation pipeline right from your GitHub repository, you don't even need an Azure DevOps account to get started.
- solatic 8y agoIf the point of the rebranding is to help drive adoption of the individual components of what used to make up VSTS, then it seems to me like the strategy is to try and get people to switch from pre-existing toolsets to Azure tooling. Maybe it would be more persuasive if you could show some kind of comparison or case study for switching? For instance, if you want to make it easier for people to adopt Azure Boards, then why should they adopt Azure Boards over the myriad other agile planning products out there? More importantly, if you're trying to make individual services easier to adopt, why is there only unified Azure DevOps pricing and not pricing solely for the individualized products (excepting Azure Pipelines pricing, which is a per-agent pricing model)?
- ethomson 8y agoYou're right that we need to provide some better comparisons here, but the big reason that I'm excited about making individual components easier to adopt isn't for competition, it's to help people round out what they're missing in a dev tools stack. There's a lot of shops that are happy with their git hosting provider and their agile planning tool and go looking for a CI/CD tool and may have been turned off by VSTS because it looked like a monolith. Making it clear that you can just use Azure Pipelines without having to use the entire stack was a priority for us, but you're absolutely right that we need to round this out with some better case studies. Thanks for the feedback.
- 8y ago
- dstaheli 8y agoPart of the change is 10 free parallel build jobs on Linux, macOS, and Windows for open source projects.
- dsr_ 8y agoThe term "DevOps" is now meaningless. The search for a new short term to describe "operations and development teams working together using high quality software tools to define, automate and distribute configuration and management information, integrating QA, release management and security" has begun.
- tootie 8y agoIt makes almost no sense for a tech platform to be a DevOps tool. It's like saying saying a programming language is better at supporting agile. DevOps is a matter of how you assign responsibility to people in your org. Not how they get there.
- tbrownaw 8y agoSome languages are better at supporting agile development. The idea behind agile is that things change, so your language needs to help rather than hinder those changes. It should make separation of concerns / single-responsibility easy, rather than something you have to fight the language for. The idea behind DevOps is integration between development and operations, in a way that eases automation of tasks where they interact. A platform absolutely can provide a structured way to do that integration, or can interfere with it.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> "operations and development teams working together using high quality software tools to define, automate and distribute configuration and management information, integrating QA, release management and security" This description has enough wiggle room that you could sail an aircraft carrier through it. I don't think there can be a short term to describe all that and stay meaningful; the term "devops" itself has always been quite fuzzy, and every person you'd ask would explain it differently.
- e12e 8y agoNot really, it's all in the first bit: "devops: operations and development teams working together."
- itomato 8y agoA new velvet cushion filled with the same old sawdust and horsehair.
- jbigelow76 8y agoEh, not a big fan of this, but if it's a just a rebrand no big deal I guess. But what happens when if the DevOps concept turns out to be a fad? Visual Studio has such a positive and strong brand association among .Net developers it seems a shame to jettison it but I suppose it's necessary as MS is trying to convince other stacks to use the Azure DevOps(VSTS) CI/CD pipelines.
- smudgymcscmudge 8y ago> But what happens when if the DevOps concept turns out to be a fad? Time to re-rebrand
- chrisrpatterson 8y ago[PM on the Azure Pipelines team] The primary focus here is making the individual services easier for teams to adopt. Azure pipelines for CI/CD, Azure Boards for planning, etc. Those services support the overall goal of improving your DevOps practices.
- smudgymcscmudge 8y agoI see that this is more than a rebranding and was just commenting with my immediate, fatuous response. I should save fatuous responses for reddit.
- nogbit 8y agoIt adds some humor and unfortunately the lack of it can make HN seem like eating burnt toast at times.
- partiallypro 8y agoJust drop the "dev" and call it AzureOps. Still way less confusing than the prior branding.
- 8y ago
- OnlyRepliesToBS 8y ago"i bet i can make devops more convoluted" "really? it's not enterprise-y enough?" "fuck no, watch this!"
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- rjbwork 8y agoStill no Mercurial. yawn Really sucks to see Microsoft giving up on us Hg users, considering it was the only viable DVCS on windows for years until people finally got git working with a bunch of issues.
- rhencke 8y agoThe yawn was really not necessary.
- manigandham 8y agoConsidering how comparatively rare it is, it's unlikely to ever be supported natively. Microsoft has invested a lot into git and now uses it for the Windows codebase, which is the largest repo by several magnitudes.
- rjbwork 8y agoI've somehow managed to work at 3 companies in a row that use Hg. I don't think it's rare at all, or maybe I'm a statistical anamoly.
- all_usernames 8y ago"Implement continuous delivery (CD) of your software to any cloud, including Azure, AWS, and GCP." Interesting move!
- LyalinDotCom 8y agoAzure DevOps has been built with an open eco-system that enables other to plug-in their products in our stack, for example AWS has their tools for VSTS (our former name): https://aws.amazon.com/vsts/ https://aws.amazon.com/vsts/
- sorrymate 8y agoI've been impressed by the ease of use for VSTS. We've adopted it for our team, and it has really reduced the friction in our CI/CD pipeline. We've been able to automate the entire process. It seemed to be easy to setup because there is a Task for just about anything you want to do. Shout out to the Azure DevOps (VSTS/TFS) team. Keep it up, nice work!
- 2-m3m3n70 8y agoI'd like to point out that it appears their Pipelines is the only hosted CI tool on the market that supports every platform. Are there any others?
- joshschreuder 8y agoWhat do you mean by supports every platform? There are a bunch of CI tools (Jenkins, Travis, etc.) that offer either hosted service that work everywhere, or on-prem which can be installed on every major platform.
- 2-m3m3n70 8y agoI mean that the hosted build environment supports every platform (Windows, Mac, Linux). Travis for instance only supports Mac and Linux. Circle CI supports Mac and Linux. Appveyor supports Windows and Linux. Other tools like Jenkins or Buildkite can be installed anywhere but you have manage the build servers.
- Sujan 8y agoI don't know of any, but are very happy about this announcement because of this reason.
- Someone1234 8y agoI wonder if Azure DevOps will have a day long outage like VSTS had last week? That had a legitimately productivity cost to a lot of companies, and the more vested in the VSTS toolchain you were the harder hit you were. I'm legitimately surprised they're launching this so soon after that, particularly considering there's been no real post-mortem, and no update on how they'll stop this happening again. "It is Azure's fault" isn't an answer, and re-branding this Azure DevOps makes that excuse almost hilarious. I'm well aware that Azure AD was down, and that VSTS has a strong dependency on it, but ultimately we're still talking about a single data center bringing down VSTS for all of North America for an entire work-day. It has been a week and now they're trying to encourage you to push your whole deployment toolchain (manage, build, test) into their cloud.
- ethomson 8y agoI certainly hope not. I'm not going to argue that this was anything but a disappointment to our customers - and one that we're eager to prevent from happening again. But we have never said that this was Azure's fault. It wasn't. We've put the blame where it belongs: on us. We're nearly done writing up the root cause analysis and an analysis of our next steps to prevent this from happening in the future.
- Someone1234 8y agoDo you happen to know where the root cause analysis will be posted if it is made public?
- ethomson 8y agoIt will be on our service availability blog: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/, and I'll reply here with a direct link once it's online.
- ethomson 8y agoUpdate: the Director of Engineering for Azure DevOps has posted this. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/?p=17485 https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice/?p=17485
- ethomson 8y agoPM for Azure DevOps here. The team is really excited about this launch, and many of us are here to answer questions on Azure DevOps, or any of the individual services like Azure Pipelines, the new GitHub Marketplace app, or our free build offer for open source projects.
- skmexyz 8y agoHello, I think I found a bug with your organizations. I own skmexyz.visualstudio.com (under sk@skme.xyz account) and I tried to transfer it to skmexyz@skmexyz.onmicrosoft.com and now: 1. Both accounts are not admins so I can't delete / modify it (it asks me to contact the administrator when I am obviously the administrator) 2. It claims that it's being managed by Default Directory on Azure but I can't appear do anything with it. I would really appreciate some help with it.
- ethomson 8y agoI'm sorry to hear that - can you contact our support directly through the method of your choice? https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/devops/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/support/devops/ has the options. (Sorry, our team hangs out most places, but we don't do support on HN).
- manigandham 8y agoThe VM based build agents are slow, especially compared to more modern CI/CD systems that today use a Docker/container based approach for each build step, along with a persistent store between each step. Is something like this going to arrive soon?
- GordonS 8y agoI've been using VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services) for a few years now, and I think it's great. But this looks like they've just changed the URL and stuck the name "Azure DevOps" onto the VSTS site? Even the pricing and plans seem to be the same - I really don't get how they're talking like they're launching something new, rather than just having a rebranding exercise after buying GitHub.
- tarekmadkour 8y agoRebranding is part of it. Also: * Pipelines is a stand-alone service that can be acquired and used separately * Pipelines can be directly acquired and configured from the GitHub marketplace * Pipelines is effectively free to use for open source * Pipelines free limits have been significantly increased for private projects * Other Azure DevOps services (e.g. Boards) can now be used separately, too
- manigandham 8y agoThat's exactly what it is: https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/team-services/ https://visualstudio.microsoft.com/team-services/ Although there have been slight tweaks and UI/UX updates.
- GordonS 8y agoThere have already been quite a lot of UI/UX updates over the past 6 months of so. TBH, I kind of wish you'd leave it the hell alone for a bit! In particular, I'm not a fan of the most recent changes to the 'build and release' pages. To edit the build pipeline, the edit link is at the top of the list of builds, rather than at the top of the list of build pipelines... I end up searching for the link every. single. time :(
- manigandham 8y agoI don't work on it, you should reply to the PM on this page or reach them via twitter/email to discuss further. Seems they are willing to listen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17953476
- styfle 8y agoHow many times has this thing been re-branded? 1. Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2. Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) 3. Azure DevOps Imagine if GitHub renamed itself every few years? Or is the idea that this is going to be marketed towards Azure users and GitHub will be promoted to the new VSTS once it gets a few more features for project management and PRs? https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1032702016064286720 https://twitter.com/styfle/status/1032702016064286720
- data_ders 8y agoyou forgot that last year it was called VSO (Visual Studio Online)
- deskamess 8y agoCan MSDN subscribers apply their credit towards this service?
- tarekmadkour 8y agoNo, they can't use their free Azure credits towards Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps is free for teams of up to five users. It's also effectively free for open source use by teams of any size. Larger teams working on private projects would need to be on one of the paid tiers and can't use the free Azure credits to pay for that.
- ethomson 8y agoTo clarify a bit: _Azure credits_ cannot be used to pay for Azure DevOps subscriptions. So if you want another parallel pipeline, then you cannot use Azure credits to pay for that. However, Visual Studio subscribers do get licenses for Azure DevOps. If you're a Visual Studio Professional subscriber, then you get a Basic license for Azure DevOps. You get additional benefits if you're a Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber. You can find the details at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/subscriptions/vs-azure-devops https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/subscriptions/...
- ianceicys 8y ago@ethomson Any word on this long standing feature request with the rebranding - read the comment on the request, a simple update would be super helpful. https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-visual-studio-team-services/suggestions/2037613-make-it-possible-to-move-a-team-project-between-te https://visualstudio.uservoice.com/forums/330519-visual-stud...
- ethomson 8y agoThis is not an area of the product that I work on, so I don't know what the status is. Let me look into it.