3 Reasons to Use Azure DevOps

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), which is the online version of Team Foundation Server, has been rebranded as Azure DevOps. All of this is fine and dandy, but what exactly does Azure DevOps/VSTS/TFS do?

TFS began as a source code management tool for teams to share and collaborate on code, but it has since evolved into a platform for managing, testing, and releasing development projects.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “My company isn’t a development shop, so why are we looking at Azure DevOps?” DevOps is the name of the game. The introduction of DevOps and the concept of infrastructure-as-code has shattered the barrier between development and operations, allowing new tools to be adopted by operations.

Teamwork

Azure DevOps is built on the concept of sharing. The ability to host and manage code centrally is critical to any organization’s optimization goals. Even if your team’s only code consists of a collection of PowerShell or VB scripts used to provision accounts or manage servers, storing it in Azure DevOps will give you a centralized location to manage it. Versioning code is an important aspect of code management and Azure DevOps has you covered whether you want to use Team Foundation Version Control or GIT.

Integration and Delivery on a Continuous Basis

Even if you don’t have any code to manage, work Items can help you coordinate the management of your systems. Work items represent some “thing”– whether it’s a server, project risk, or system bug is up to you– but the real power comes when you create them within a process template. You can model your work items around an Agile Framework (which is good for software development) or the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), which is good for systems administration, using a process template. Work items, no matter how you arrange them, can assist your team in breaking down complex systems into manageable workloads.

A platform that is open to all

Azure Devops supports a wide range of industry and community tools. It’s a far cry from the early version of TFS, which was a closed-off single-vendor solution. As previously mentioned, there is a marketplace with hundreds of extensions, so if Azure Develops doesn’t do something out of the box, chances are there is a tool on the market that does.

Microsoft has been a clear leader in promoting cooperation even with competitors in this area of openness, as evidenced by the marketplace, which includes integration extensions for AWS, Slack, and ServiceNow. All of this integration was done with the customer in mind, as Azure DevOps aims to be just one of many tools you can use to manage your code.