Azure DevOps is a game change
Rating: 8 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We use Azure DevOps to manage the end-to-end lifecycle of our code. We use Boards to capture our backlog and manage the work through delivery, Pipelines for our code repository, and Pipelines for CI/CD.
Pros
- Azure Boards is fast to use once you have a good structure in place. You can create or modify each task type quickly. The consequence of that is that is it reduces your admin overhead so its a no-brainer to create lots of smaller tasks.
- Azure Repos is simple to set up compared to other on prem solutions that we have used. Most options come out of the box including user management.
- The Pipelines tool is very powerful, and you can quickly create your CI/CD pipelines. Simple to see the state of each pipeline at a glance.
Cons
- Azure Boards can be daunting to set up. There are a lot of different features and if you don't know what you are doing it's easy to overcomplicate things.
- If you have lots of similar Pipelines to create there is no way to template them, each one has to be created and managed separately. So if your target K8s cluster changes, you have to manually edit each Pipeline.
Likelihood to Recommend
Azure DevOps is good to use if you are all-in on the Microsoft Azure stack. It's fully integrated across Azure so it is a point-and-click for most of what you will need to achieve. If you are new to Azure make sure you get some outside experience to help you otherwise it is very easy to overcomplicate things and go down the wrong track, or for you to manually create things that come out of the box.
Alternatives
Axosoft, Bitbucket, Bamboo and Octopus Deploy
Azure DevOps is a fully integrated solution that solves all of the problems that our separate tools did in a much easier-to-use way. Before we implemented DevOps we had three different solutions that we had to integrate with each other and required a lot of manual intervention to make sure they worked correctly.
Vetted Review
1 year of experience