Microsoft is currently basking in the afterglow of its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, the market-leading code sharing repository. Since the June announcement of the transaction, we have been wondering what the company plans to do with its existing project collaboration tool. Today, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) has been rebranded as Azure DevOps.
In an announcement on the Azure blog, Microsoft says VSTS is evolving Under the Azure DevOps name, the service will now feature numerous modules that function in public or private cloud:
“Azure DevOps captures over 15 years of investment and learnings in providing tools to support software development teams. In the last month, over 80,000 internal Microsoft users and thousands of our customers, in teams both small and large, used these services to ship products to you.”
Microsoft details the modules available in Azure DevOps@
- Azure Pipelines: CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any Git repository and deploy continuously.
- 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.
Transition
Current users of VSTS will have their existing projects moved automatically to DevOps. Microsoft says the transition will happen over the coming weeks. The company insists users will now have to worry about losing any functionality when the switch is completed.
However, the company says there are some considerations to make ahead of the change:
- URLs will change from abc.visualstudio.com to dev.azure.com/abc. We will support redirects from visualstudio.com URLs so there will not be broken links.
- As part of this change, the services have an updated user experience. We continue to iterate on the experience based on feedback from the preview. Today we’re enabling it by default for new customers. In the coming months we will enable it by default for existing users.
- Users of the on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS) will continue to receive updates based on features live in Azure DevOps. Starting with next version of TFS, the product will be called Azure DevOps Server and will continue to be enhanced through our normal cadence of updates.
