4 ms·

As a mostly very satisfied user, I gotta say, y'all have a great product. The CI/CD part of VSTS (I like the old name better :P) is killer and by far my favorit

As a mostly very satisfied user, I gotta say, y'all have a great product. The CI/CD part of VSTS (I like the old name better :P) is killer and by far my favorite platform to use now. However, I've had my builds break twice out of nowhere with no recourse other than submitting a forum post and hoping someone gets back to me in a reasonable amount of time. I can't imagine going back to another platform, but its really frustrating when your production release process for a client is completely down and you have no way to fix it. Is there a way to get better support in those scenarios?

ethomson 8y ago
I'm sorry to hear that - without knowing more about how it broke, it's hard for me to say. Can you give me some more information about how it's broken in the past? Links to the forums posts would be great. Probably the best way to get them to me is by email, it's my HN name @microsoft.com.
GordonS 8y ago
Another (mostly) happy VSTS user here, also loving the CI/CD functionality. I too have had builds break recently out of nowhere: 1. Related to NPM being upgraded on the hosted agent, which was fixed easily enough (after trawling through logs) by forcing the task to use an older version 2. SQL LocalDB connections stopped working, so integration tests couldn't run - this lasted for around 2 weeks! I also ended up on the Microsoft support forums... unfortunately, responses on those forums from Microsoft staff are invariably late and of infuriatingly poor quality. I ended up on the VSTS Agent image GitHub site instead, and raising an issue there was far more helpful. VSTS is a great product, I just really wish there was a decent support option for when things go wrong. I also wish Microsoft would actively communicate with impacted customers to notify them where there are outages. Oh, and I wish the hosted build agents ran on better hardware - they are slow, even compared to the smaller Azure VMs. For example, we have a build that takes 14 minutes on the (paid) hosted agent, or 3 minutes on a B2ms Azure VM. Some of that is down to NPM and Nuget package caching, but even the actual msbuild and test stages are much slower.
- ethomson 8y ago
  I'm glad you're mostly happy, but I'm sorry it's only mostly. I hope that we'll improve this. Honestly, the lowest latency mechanism is to hit @AzureDevOps up on twitter (or me personally) and we'll make sure that your problems get routed to the right person. For outages, you can subscribe at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice (in the toolbar on the right hand side). We don't send out email notifications without you opting in, nor will we, but we do have some ideas to improve the way we notify people that we're working on. And as for build agents, we're working on that, especially around the caching. Appreciate all the feedback.

ethomson 8y ago

I'm sorry to hear that - without knowing more about how it broke, it's hard for me to say. Can you give me some more information about how it's broken in the past? Links to the forums posts would be great. Probably the best way to get them to me is by email, it's my HN name @microsoft.com.

GordonS 8y ago

Another (mostly) happy VSTS user here, also loving the CI/CD functionality. I too have had builds break recently out of nowhere: 1. Related to NPM being upgraded on the hosted agent, which was fixed easily enough (after trawling through logs) by forcing the task to use an older version 2. SQL LocalDB connections stopped working, so integration tests couldn't run - this lasted for around 2 weeks! I also ended up on the Microsoft support forums... unfortunately, responses on those forums from Microsoft staff are invariably late and of infuriatingly poor quality. I ended up on the VSTS Agent image GitHub site instead, and raising an issue there was far more helpful. VSTS is a great product, I just really wish there was a decent support option for when things go wrong. I also wish Microsoft would actively communicate with impacted customers to notify them where there are outages. Oh, and I wish the hosted build agents ran on better hardware - they are slow, even compared to the smaller Azure VMs. For example, we have a build that takes 14 minutes on the (paid) hosted agent, or 3 minutes on a B2ms Azure VM. Some of that is down to NPM and Nuget package caching, but even the actual msbuild and test stages are much slower.

ethomson 8y ago
I'm glad you're mostly happy, but I'm sorry it's only mostly. I hope that we'll improve this. Honestly, the lowest latency mechanism is to hit @AzureDevOps up on twitter (or me personally) and we'll make sure that your problems get routed to the right person. For outages, you can subscribe at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice (in the toolbar on the right hand side). We don't send out email notifications without you opting in, nor will we, but we do have some ideas to improve the way we notify people that we're working on. And as for build agents, we're working on that, especially around the caching. Appreciate all the feedback.