About this blog series

What is Azure DevOps?


Here is an extract from the article that I had written earlier - Azure vs DevOps vs Azure DevOps:

Azure DevOps is a tool that offers the different practices in a DevOps workflow as services. You can choose to use all or any of these services in your application's life cycle.

Azure DevOps evolved from Team Foundation Server, which was at one point, an on-premise only solution. Microsoft is now offering this product as a cloud service as well, which was earlier named VSTS (Visual Studio Team Services), and was later rebranded to Azure DevOps Services. The server version is now called Azure DevOps Server.

The services offered include:

  1. Azure Boards - for planning and tracking. This is where you would create backlogs, do capacity planning, infer reports like velocity and burn down.
  2. Azure Pipelines - for creating CI / CD workflows. Create pipelines for automated builds and deployments. This is platform, language and cloud independent.
  3. Azure Repos - for version controlling, offers Git / TFVC. Allows you to create repos to host and version control the source code.
  4. Azure Test Plan - for managing your tests. Create Test Plans. Suites and test cases, and run them manually or associate automated test methods.
  5. Azure Artifacts - for package management. Supports hosting different package feeds like npm, Maven, NuGet etc.
Also here is a crisp 2 minute video on : What is Azure DevOps.

About this blog series :

Azure DevOps administrator is not a very common role. But if you are one of them, I am trying to list down some of the activities that comes under the responsibilities of this role, and suggestions on performing them in a better way. 

There are things that can easily be overlooked, and things that can be automated to improve efficiency. This series of blog posts is an attempt to create a collection of items that can make your life better and easier as an Azure DevOps admin. Please share your feedback and thoughts and point out items that can possibly be included.

I am also a bit confused with what the right abbreviation for Azure DevOps is, so please read ADO = AzD = Azure DevOps :). Planning to start this with some posts on license and cost management for Azure DevOps.

Here is the first one : Managing user licenses and cost for Azure DevOps

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