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If 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

If 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 ago
You'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.
- solatic 8y ago
  Yeah that would be a good start. There's clear value-add here for on-prem teams which are starting to move to the cloud, by making it easier to run builds both on Azure and on-prem (seeing the $15/month pricing per agent) from the same cloud-based product, which I don't think anybody else is doing yet? But there doesn't seem to be any documentation about how to get that set up? It would definitely help to see comparisons against competition, e.g. GitLab, CircleCI
  - ethomson 8y ago
    Yeah - the hybrid cloud and on-premises build agents is actually one of my favorite features. The open source project that I help maintain (libgit2) uses VSTS's hosted Linux, Windows and macOS build agents, but add support for some other platforms (like ARM) with on-premises build agents. ("On-premises build agents" makes it sound fancier than it is, it's actually Raspberry Pi's on my desk, but hey, whatever works, right?)

ethomson 8y ago

You'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.

solatic 8y ago
Yeah that would be a good start. There's clear value-add here for on-prem teams which are starting to move to the cloud, by making it easier to run builds both on Azure and on-prem (seeing the $15/month pricing per agent) from the same cloud-based product, which I don't think anybody else is doing yet? But there doesn't seem to be any documentation about how to get that set up? It would definitely help to see comparisons against competition, e.g. GitLab, CircleCI
- ethomson 8y ago
  Yeah - the hybrid cloud and on-premises build agents is actually one of my favorite features. The open source project that I help maintain (libgit2) uses VSTS's hosted Linux, Windows and macOS build agents, but add support for some other platforms (like ARM) with on-premises build agents. ("On-premises build agents" makes it sound fancier than it is, it's actually Raspberry Pi's on my desk, but hey, whatever works, right?)