Microsoft Azure DevOps Reviews

We use Microsoft Azure DevOps for application lifecycle management, including source control-related things, pipelines, and also for work item management. In short, the whole ecosystem.

Within our organization, there are roughly one thousand core developers using this solution. We also have stakeholders, product vendors, Scrum masters, testers, and manual testers. 

Mainly the source code solutions and the pipelines. Work item management and the manual test I/O. Test automation, end-to-end testing, and the manual test experience. It's got something that you won't find in other products. The work item management is good enough for small to medium-sized teams, and for large projects with plenty of teams collaborating with each other.

We can achieve the boundaries of the system. Potentially, we could do it with other tools like Jira. Still, with Microsoft Azure DevOps, we can manage everything.

Currently, if you would like to use the full-set of customization features, for example, the process templates, the HL process, or the Scrum process, if you start from scratch right now, you'll have these options. But if you've been working for several years in an established ecosystem, then you're based on an old-fashioned way of working and you won't be able to use the recent customization features.

There are options to get around this, especially if you move to the cloud or if you copy things and migrate them, but that's a huge amount of work. It's best if you start from scratch in a new project — in a new environment. With an ecosystem that has been up and running for some time, you won't have the full-flexibility that you would have with a new ecosystem.

We have been using this solution for roughly 10 years. 

This solution is stable. I don't have anything negative to report. 

Microsoft Azure DevOps is very scalable. It uses techniques from Microsoft itself, so if you have the knowledge of how to deal with that, you can scale it up and out as you wish.

Technical support is good. We have had a few cases where we needed support and they contacted us immediately. There was a willingness to find a solution and determine if there was a bug or if it was an oversight. We have a good relationship with Mircosoft support.

The initial setup is easy.

Most of our developers have an MSDN license which is linked to the Visual Studio development environment. 

We also have a corporate license for other products like Windows Server — it's all included in one package. An additional license is not required for the on-premise solution. If you go to the cloud, it's a different story. Most of the things that we need and use are incorporated in the corporate solution — there are no additional costs.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. 

It could be a little bit more flexible in terms of work item management. Apart from that, I can't really think of many features that are missing. It supports all kinds of ecosystems; there are a lot of possibilities when it comes to interacting with other ecosystems. 

Try to follow the market standards. There's a whole huge community that supports it. The market is evolving very fast. Microsoft is acquiring other companies. They recently bought GitHub. It's hard to say which solution will survive — DevOps or GitHub. That may be an issue in the future. 

We normally use DevOps. On the application, everything has gone DevOps, however, we don't use the functions. All applications developed there have gone under Azure or AWS. We normally develop them to be able to not be dependent on anything, so if we want to deploy them in another environment, we can deploy them easily. If we want to use it in Azure, we use it in Azure. If we want AWS, we use it in AWS.

I like the CD pipeline. It's the most valuable feature for us. It's so easy to integrate into the CD/CI environment. I mostly love that one.

The initial setup is quick and easy.

The functions have too much dependency right now, so it makes it really, really hard to upgrade and make a change in the code. 

If you want to use the DPR it's a bit harder due to the fact that it's only 30 days.

We've been using the solution for a year and a half at this point.

The stability of the product has been good so far. I can't say that I've witnessed glitches. There aren't bugs. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable, as far as I can tell.

We don't have any issues with the scalability of the solution. If we need to, we're able to scale.

We've never contacted Microsoft for technical assistance. 

We are Microsoft partners. We have several Azure experts on our development team, and we have a tech that came from the US and did the training for us. We have a very strong understanding of the product and therefore we don't need help with troubleshooting or anything of that nature.

We also currently use AWS, however, I prefer Microsoft's solution as it's a bit easier to use overall.

We did not find the initial setup to be complex. The implementation is straight forward. 

Deployment is quick and typically only takes a few days or so.

We have ten people that handle maintenance. They are in different parts of the world. We have two in Australia, for example, and two in the USA.

The cost can get pretty high if you aren't paying attention to what you are doing.

We're partners with Microsoft.

I'd highly recommend Microsoft, and I recommend it more than any other solution. Everything is very simple and straightforward. The only worry for some organizations may be the cost. You need to be really, really careful.

I'd rate the solution overall nine out of ten. I think it's really, really great. If the functions were a bit better, I'd give it a full ten out of ten.

Building fast and reliable, amplified feedback loops in all stages of our software delivery and operations lifecycle. The business strives for built-in quality to ensure that everyone have correctly done their job. 

I trust my team with peer reviews of our designs, code, test and infrastructure.

I'm familiar with Azure DevOps in the sense that my group directive has based the administration, architecture, and development on Azure. So whichever hat that I need to wear at the time that's the one I can wear.

I would say that Pipelines is Azure's most valuable feature. Also generally, Azure enables us to create a staging environment through to a production environment in an easier way and then get the code and run that. It also has decent pull requests and things like that.

Azure DevOps is a very cross-platform product. One of the issues that I have currently with the company is that they are using two different parts of technology. They were using JIRA for their sprint work and they were also using Confluence, as well as other Enterprise software. I advised them that all their sprint planning, backlog work, and everything else, can be done out of Azure DevOps from one central place. I know the Microsoft team will always look at improvements because I know that they are constantly looking at improvements to products while listening to their customers and looking at a global scale. I'm keeping my ear to the ground, as I always do.

The product keeps evolving and at the moment there are a lot of good parts There are petabytes of data. Anytime somebody does a pull request or anything else, Microsoft is notified about it. So if somebody, somewhere is always looking at that and watching, that can be a revolutionary product. It's a product that can continuously grow and evolve in time. Even if it is not yet what you call a finished article, it's a growing and evolving product.

Everybody has a slightly different take on what solutions or what part of the solution they would like to be improved. You can always improve a platform. Microsoft is always listening to customers and they will bring out a new version. The platform is quite user-friendly at the moment because you can use any program or language with it. You can't say you need another program, because as far as I'm concerned the main ones can be integrated with Azure. The newer ones like Go, as well as older ones like Python, Java, and PSP,  can all be integrated with that platform.

I suppose when we hear about that release, I have no doubt that because Microsoft captures a lot of metrics and information that they monitor, like capturing data about what or how people use their product, they can see where the usage is and where they might want to remove a feature. That analysis and also comes from Microsoft's monitoring capabilities.

I thought it was very stable. They didn't have any shaky moments. Predominantly with Azure DevOps you need one thing only: a solid internet connection. If you've got a solid Internet connection, you just push everything up to the platform or run an integral request. I haven't had any issues with that. Some people might have, but it all comes down to their internet connection.

This solution is extremely scalable.

It helps a lot in Microservices or service technologies. Using the infrastructures of code enables a productivity increase of a thousand percent. I was speaking with a company that was pulling 12 requests at one time but using competitive technology like DevOps they were able to pull over 2000 requests at the same time. It's extremely scalable and you can use it to scale down when it needs it. It's a completely autonomous product, that allows you to scale whatever you need.

I have five or six back end developers that use it every day. They learn every day, so whatever code or scripts they write are in Azure DevOps. They're not using any another tool to do it, they are pulling it with the platform because you can't tell other people about a platform if you aren't using it yourself. The first thing they do is log on to DevOps.

There will be an increase in our usage of the product. We are looking to expand at some point. The more people that come on board, the more use there is for the product.

We haven't had a requirement to contact their technical support. I have contacted their technical support before under some other projects and got a really good response from the person on the other end of the phone. They are always looking to help you solve more solutions as quickly as they possibly can.

I don't think I have had a bad experience; I've always had continuity. They were able to get me the problem resolved, whether it was a P1 or P4 issue. I've never had a problem with the technical support.

I have experience with Amazon Web Services. As the Azure product has matured a lot in the last two to three years, it deserves its market share at the moment. We were using other products, like Visual Studio, a web service which is an old name for Visual DevOps. We were also using things like Team Foundation Server (TFS). We were just using some of the older tech.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We did the implementation ourselves.

I'm working on the high-level design and the low-level design so I know where we're going to start, and whether we've got a blank slate. I've worked with many firms in the past and companies have their own design in place. Usually, some of these companies material is outdated and Microsoft will probably move the bar several times. We are Microsoft accredited so we stay in touch with the technology more recently than most. We've constantly been informed of the latest technology and the latest products that are evolving on the platform. That includes those that are in preview, which I hope will become available, as well as those that are going to be deprecated. We're basically in full harmony with Microsoft and their products.

We most definitely achieved an ROI.

Check out the pricing information from Azure Cost and analysis information.

No Visual Studio Team Services and Visual code were the preferred options.

The first thing that I would suggest is to read the documentation for the platform. The online documentation changes pretty much every other week; there is always something new coming out. Practice, practice, and practice. Test, practice, and repeat. You need to know your way around the platform and the only way to do that is by hands-on practice. You can't break the environment, but you can speed things up on the thirteenth hour. It depends on how you configure things since every configuration is different. It's an excellent product that is taking into account current technology, yet also flexible enough to use with future technology.

At the moment I would rate Azure DevOps as a nine out of ten. The reason I wouldn't give anything a ten is because it's constantly evolving. There is room for improvement, as this is not the finished article at all. The reason I would give it a nine is the information to get the best usage out of the product is readily available. I've been using Microsoft tech for over 25 years now and back in the day it was difficult to get information out of Microsoft even when you were an MCPN. You would have a special link to go through a Microsoft back door to gain information. That's completely different to the advice that you would get related to Microsoft.com. Now Microsoft is completely different with everything readily available. You can download it in pdot format and the document could be 2000-3000 pages. They leave no stone unturned.

The only problem I would say at the moment is a friend of mine said that the Microsoft test book is taking a long time to come out because he wants to take the exam. Some people need to read the information and retain the information that way. Sometimes you go on these courses that are not run by Microsoft directly. They can be very flaky and don't have all the information or experience of using the product in normal working life.

If there is anything I would ask for, it's to get the documentation out on hardback so that we can add it to our libraries. That would be very good.

The two most valuable features are Azure Pipelines for DevOps automation, and Azure Test Plan for test management.

It is quite easy to create a pipeline, from continuous integration to automated testing, to continuous delivery, performance testing, and continuous deployment. It's graphical representation and tools are easy to use.

The automated testing in DevTest is the big advantage of Azure DevOps.

Non-functional testing such as security testing, penetration testing, and performance testing could be improved. 

This Cloud solution is very stable.

We have approximately one hundred users, the majority of which are developers. There are some project managers and team leads, as well as different levels of management who present to stakeholders.

Currently, two or three of our development teams use Azure DevOps. In the future, we plan to include five more teams. This will grow the number of active users from one hundred to two or three hundred.

I have not used Microsoft support directly. We have an internal support team that is dedicated to Office 365, Azure DevOps, and other Microsoft solutions.

Prior to this, we used Team Foundation Server versions 2017 and 2018 on-premise, and it was a stable solution.

We also used the Atlassian stack, including Jira, Bamboo, and Confluence, all on-premise. The problem is that the on-premise version has an expiry. We moved to a cloud solution because it is easy to support, easy to upgrade, and easy to stage our products. It is distributed between our offices, as we have development teams split into different locations around the country. The cloud-based solution is the best way to integrate our development effort.

I have also worked with HP ALM/Quality Center in the past.

The initial setup for this solution is quite easy.

Our internal DevOps team handled the implementation.

I have worked with other products, and this is the best solution in the market in 2019.

Deployment of solutions on Azure DevOps is a perfect way to provide Disaster Recovery and High Availability. This is a straightforward solution, and I would suggest not wasting any time looking at others.

Right now, this is the best solution.

I would rate this solution ten out of ten.

All the artifacts are tightly integrated into the repository where you have changed tracking, and you can enforce policies. You can improve the quality of your deliverables. You can actually see the progress you're making towards your goal, and you can even forecast how soon a feature can be completed in the future. So, it's that tight integration of bringing all the parties together right from the project managers to the developers, to the system admin who does the deployment that helps achieve the goal of DevOps. That is, the ease of realization of this DevOps ideal is possible.

Most developers and project managers choose the Microsoft tools to begin with because of familiarity, and these new tools are almost an extension of the tools you're already familiar with. There's a lot of knowledge transfer, which helps, rather than bringing in a new product line.

Also, with Azure DevOps there is tight integration to Excel and Office tools so that you can actually even use Excel to do Azure DevOps type tasks. Excel will automatically update the Azure board, your tasks, your company boards, etc. So, there is that condition and familiarity for users.

What I like about it mostly is the tools. You don't need a degree to use them. Also, there's not too heavy a reliance on the CLI.

Right now, they tend to have a limit of 1,000 tasks per sprint, and some of their web-based boards, such as the Kanban boards, no longer display tasks. Once you hit over a certain number of task limits, you need to increase those limits. Depending on how big the sprints you're running are, once you hit that 1,000 limit, you now have to start grouping tasks together. It doesn't allow you to track granularly. When you go to the boards and you are rendering the task board, it gets slower to go over that 1,000 limit. If they could improve that to, maybe, 10,000 and still have good performance, that'd be great.

I've been using it for eight years.

The version we use right now is the 2020 version, but usually, we try and keep within the last two versions.

Depending on the organization, it can be deployed on-premises or as a cloud solution, usually with Microsoft Azure as the cloud provider.

It's very, very stable.

I've used it in organizations with multiple departments using the same installation, and it's scalable. We have about 20 users in multiple departments.

Microsoft support is excellent. Even when you don't have support for some lines, you can call them, and a lot of times, they'll give you what's called a grace case. This means that although you don't have a support contract on a product, they'll help you for free.

Normally, when you call and don't have a support agreement, Microsoft will still charge you an hourly rate to give you an engineer to work with you.

Microsoft Azure DevOps just provides better integration than Jenkins does. I've been in this industry for 27 years. The whole ecosystem and the fact that most of the developers are already using Visual Studio make Microsoft Azure DevOps a good option, along with the entire integration from the project management side, to the development side, to the repository side, and to the deployment side.

Installing Microsoft Azure DevOps is straightforward. You can have everything set up in three or four hours. It's pretty simple.

I've used Jenkins in the past and a group of source repository. I've also used SourceSafe and GitLab.

To run it, to use the tool the way it's designed, you need someone who understands Scrum or Agile project management.

I have used GitLab and other pipeline tools like Jenkins. Azure DevOps combines all of them together, and it beats all of them at everything they do.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this solution at nine and advise others to go for it.

I have been working with it for different projects and purposes. I'm basically the main architect for such solutions.

It is stable. I like Azure a lot. All our guys are Microsoft certified. 

It is fairly new, so there are a lot of changes, and because it keeps on changing, you need to adapt to those changes.

Its setup is quite complex.

It is stable.

We never used Microsoft's technical support. We always get it right.

Its initial setup is quite complex. There are a lot of caveats. Even if I can call a setup out of the box, it is not really out of the box.

We managed everything on our own. It involved fitting other products with the existing product. If you don't encounter problems, you're not going to learn.

We are 100% satisfied with it. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We use the solution for performance testing in general.

One of the main features is the user interface is very good.

The user management in the solution could improve.

I have been using it for four years.

The support for this solution has been fine.

The price is reasonable for the solution.

I rate Microsoft Azure DevOps a nine out of ten.

We use it to manage the project. We create the product backlog, and we put our tasks into the DevOps schedule.

Azure DevOps allow you to create a bridge for maintenance and support, directly to the client. We can forecast tasks and the number of hours a task will take and can compare it with how long a task actually takes. The Timetracker function allows us to put all this together. Before Azure DevOps, we had difficulty predicting how long tasks would take, considering all the parts that must work together.

We have a component server, which is basically a tracker. This is very useful for us to itemise the start and end of tasks to evaluate the resources required, based on price. So it's very valuable. It is important to be able to inspect the items required in a project.

The communication could work better, especially for the development team. The important thing is that the tracker tools provide adequate communication, as do other tools. It seems to be lacking in DevOps and is an area which could be improved. We also need to improve publishing in production. In the future, we would like Azure DevOps to work with automated tasks regarding publishing. Better integration with existing source code is another area, which would benefit from improvement. The search repository could be more comprehensive, and visualisations could be optimised, further.

We have been using Azure DevOps for around two years. We are a Microsoft partner, so we use Azure DevOps as part of that partnership.

Stability is excellent. Initially, we had some problems with performance, but nowadays it's okay. Maybe they improved the server.

It's good scalability, but we need to improve the process by understanding it a lot more.

We never actually contacted support. The best plan is to read through all the documentation, but getting the right documentation for your specific project is not always easy to find, as there is so much to go through.

It's average, because we need to research what we are trying to achieve, and the platform has rich functionality. This is a good thing, but it can also mean setup is very complicated. However, we usually find that after testing more, we find our way around what we are trying to achieve.

Our deployment took about three months, as we tracked it. Following that period, we needed another month to integrate a new component into the setup. We implemented it ourselves, with one of our team. We have about 10 users using Azure DevOps, but we have 2 people to provide the deployment out of those. These are developers. We have a small team for DevOps, including the manager. We need our staff to be flexible and agile in our team to take on various DevOps tasks.

As a Microsoft Partner, you get a discount on the pricing. Licensing costs are around $80 a month for DevOps, but for Azure, it is about $200 a month.

We tried other tools, but Azure DevOps has a richer toolset, and it fits in better with our process. To some extent, as we are a Microsoft partner, we didn't seriously consider other options. However, we did look at Jira and Gitlab as potential alternatives.

I would rate Azure DevOps as an 8 out of 10. I would ensure that DevOps' use is planned, in detail, including the implementation before using the software. I would also ensure you have a thorough knowledge of the main components of the system. This will ultimately save hours of work.