Azure

What Is Azure DevOps? Everything You Need to Know

In today's fast-paced world of software development, agility and collaboration are key to delivering high-quality products on time. Azure DevOps has emerged as a powerful solution that brings together development, operations, and testing teams, enabling them to work seamlessly throughout the entire application lifecycle.

Whether you're a seasoned developer, an IT professional, or a project manager, understanding Azure DevOps can revolutionize the way you approach software development. Learn more about what Azure Devops is and how you can use it to improve collaboration.

What is Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps is a suite of Microsoft services designed to support software development projects. It encompasses a range of tools for version control, agile planning, continuous integration and delivery, and other related services. By utilizing Azure DevOps, developers and teams can improve collaboration, automate builds and deployments, and optimize their software projects.

This cloud-based service is adaptable to building and deploying applications across a variety of platforms and environments. In this article, we'll see what Azure DevOps offers, its purpose, and how it compares to other competitors.

What are Azure DevOps Services?

What does Azure DevOps offer to deliver on its promises? Let’s outline this within the context of the five primary services offered on the platform:

Azure Artifacts

Azure Artifacts service enables developers to generate, store, and distribute packages among their teams and organizations. It offers versioning, access control, and package caching features that aid developers in building and deploying software more effectively. Technically, it streamlines the software development process.

This software offering from Azure allows you to consume and publish different types of packages with ease. Here are the different types of packages Artifacts supports:

Build artifacts
NuGet
npm
Maven
PyPl
Universal Packages
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Azure Boards

Azure Boards offers highly visual and interactive tools to help developers manage their software projects. These boards track progress on software development, report bugs, detect issues, and highlight defects that require your attention.

Azure Boards is a great way to stay in touch with clients (or other recipients of your code). With a tool called ‘User Stories’, clients can report bugs themselves, and you’ll quickly see all relevant information needed to address their problems. With the code version in use, you can readily view the progress history of your software projects.

Azure Boards is also incredibly customizable. It can easily scale for whatever your project requires. Start as simply as you want and balloon the project into a multi-team affair when needed, for no extra cost.

Azure Pipelines

Azure Pipelines is an automated path you can send code on to have it tested and deployed to both test and production environments. This helps you continuously improve your code by utilizing automated processes and other team members who may review the code and mark it for errors.

This is possible thanks to two primary processes:

Continuous integration: The practice of automatically merging and testing code to catch bugs early in the development cycle.
Continuous delivery: The process of building, testing, and deploying code to the relevant parties.

These pipelines work with virtually any coding language, meaning you won’t have to learn a new programming language to use Azure DevOps.

Azure Repos

Azure Repos is a set of version controls you can use to manage your code more efficiently. Version control is the practice of tracking changes to your software code so you can see exactly how and when your code changes over time.

This helps you coordinate more effectively with other developers. It also saves your work, providing immense value and safeguarding valuable work should any type of data loss occur.

Azure Repos offers two types of version control:

Git (distributed): The most commonly used version control system, its distributed model means your local copy of code is a complete version control repository, letting you work offline and remotely when needed.
TFVC (centralized): Team Foundation Version Control (TVFC) is a centralized type of version control, meaning all historical data is maintained from a single server.

Azure Repos is still incredibly useful if you don’t plan on developing with a team. It helps you stay organized as you fix bugs and allows you to roll back to previous versions of your code when needed.

Azure Test Plans

Azure Test Plans provides additional testing tools to ensure the quality of your code. There are four primary test objectives Test Plans is designed to measure:

Manual and exploratory testing: Manually testing code for reasons such as stakeholder feedback and exploratory discovery.
Automated testing: Utilizing Azure Pipeline’s testing capabilities, as mentioned previously.
Traceability: Testing cases linked to user stores, features, and requirements.
Reporting and analysis: Analyze the test results and create reports with actionable insights into how your code needs to be altered.

What Is Azure DevOps Used For?

Azure DevOps can be used for virtually any code or application development project you wish to complete. It is designed to make that coding experience more collaborative, easier to test, and faster to deploy. Azure DevOps will help you leverage your essential DevOps skills so you can do more with what you know.

Azure DevOps has many features that inspire better collaboration among development teams. It also gives plenty of benefits to solo developers.

What are the Benefits of Azure DevOps?

Azure DevOps offers a wide range of benefits that can significantly enhance software development and operations processes. Here are some of the key advantages:

1. Integrated Toolset

Azure DevOps provides an all-in-one suite of tools for version control, build automation, continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD), and project management. This integration reduces the need for multiple third-party tools and ensures consistency across the development lifecycle.

Scalability

Azure DevOps is highly scalable, making it suitable for projects of all sizes, from small teams to large enterprises. It can easily accommodate growing teams and complex projects without compromising performance or efficiency.

Enhanced Security

Azure DevOps includes built-in security features that help protect your code and data. It also supports compliance with industry standards and regulations, making it easier to maintain security and meet regulatory requirements.

Azure DevOps vs the Competition

While Azure DevOps is very popular for application development project management, it is not the only DevOps product on the market. Azure only captures about 20% of the DevOps market. So, how does it compare against the competition? Let’s find out:

Azure DevOps vs AWS

Azure’s biggest competitor is AWS, Amazon’s cloud computing service.

AWS carries a great deal of computing power. It has more data storage capabilities than Azure while also connecting with an open-source community model, making it easier to develop code. With no other factors considered, these advantages make AWS a faster alternative to Azure.

But that speed comes at a cost.

AWS is about five times more expensive than Azure, making it less friendly for those who are new to coding and want to get an intro to cloud computing. Azure is also trusted by some of the world's most recognizable brands. If those brands don’t need excessive computational power, it may be overkill for your organization.

Azure DevOps vs Jira

Some people confused Azure’s services with Jira, a project management tool that also helps you track bugs and other proprietary issues. However, Jira can be used for project management beyond the scope of software development. However, because of that wider scope, it misses out on the granular services that make software development so streamlined.

So, if you’re looking to manage software development projects primarily, Azure is typically the better option.