Microsoft Azure DevOps Reviews

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 Repos, Wikis, and pipelines are all excellent features.

The solution could work to improve their reporting.

The stability of the solution is good.

The scalability of the solution is good. I would give it a four or five-star rating. We have plans to increase usage. Right now we have about 100 users on the solution.

Technical support has been excellent. On that side, Microsoft is very good. The customer support of Microsoft has really improved this past year. On the cloud side also we are very satisfied because it offers very good support.

We did not previously use a different solution.

The initial setup is straightforward. We just implement it from the cloud. We took it and configured it with our local website infrastructure, so there was nothing much to do.

There is a licensing fee of $6/user per month. That's not too much money for us. There aren't really any additional costs beyond that.

We considered using Jenkins, but we decided to use Azure DevOps because we have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft. It was much easier.

We are using the public cloud deployment model.

Potential users should not hesitate to move to Azure DevOps. It keeps on progressing and keeps on adding new features all of the time, so it's a solution that I would highly recommend people use.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten.

The ability to interact with various other Azure services like for a deployment or using CICD was very helpful because when we leverage it for Azure IT helps. There's no CICD pipeline available. They provided us with some of the plugins to deploy that onto the Azure IOT edge.

They do very frequent releases, there's a complete change in UI kind of stuff. Sometimes it feels like they change it too often. They fix issues and add new features quite regularly which is good. 

They leverage a lot of new features, new features get released frequently, and sometimes the change management on our side is a bit complicated because we'll see something and there's an entirely different way how it is presented. You need to get it all working again.

Previously we asked them for more analytics on top of what they already had so that we could look at it comprehensively and see how the projects are progressing. They implemented these changes for us. 

It's stable. It's good. If there are some features missing we connect with the Microsoft team and then they get it developed and we utilize it.

It is very scalable. We use it for quite a lot of projects including running the data and all that stuff. We do quite a lot of analysis and analytics on top of that.

We have hundreds of users using this solution.

We don't really use technical support for incidents but more for developing new features. 

I've been using Microsoft based solutions, like VST and then like before that DSS. It was a natural progression from VSTS into Azure DevOps.

The initial setup is straightforward. We've been using Microsoft products for a while. 

It's a good tool, quite rich, it has a lot of features, and quite a lot of analytical capabilities which are built on top of it so that you can see how your projects are going and all that stuff. It's a good tool.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

Agile scrum project management of a software product in a start-up company. We are a team of 11 people located in different countries.

We have team members in different locations of the world. Azure DevOps is the main communication tool between the product owners, UX designers, and developers.

Its configurable dashboard offers various display options for the stakeholders of the project.

• Dashboard
• Query
• Sub-tasks configuration
• Extensions library
• Visual Studio and other MS product integrations.

• It would be better to have a free-text query editor. 
• Product management/roadmap planning features are missing.
• Parent Column is added in listings and we expect to see it in queries as well

Refreshing the browser is needed when a data is updated. I am expecting Microsoft to prepare an Azure DevOps application running on PC and downloaded from the MS app store.

It is easy to use if you are already familiar with Microsoft products. 

We are currently involved in a financing exchange project, and we use this solution to keep track of the exchange activities within the backlog. We are not taking advantage of the repository and the code stuff at this stage. 

The most valuable feature for us at this stage is the Azure Boards.

I really like the user interface. For comparison, I have been using JIRA for several years now, and I am rather skilled at using that tool. The reason for my using Azure DevOps is because my client uses it. My first impression of DevOps, after using JIRA, is that it has a much better, more intuitive, and more user-friendly interface. That first impression is still valid, today.

There is a lack of integration and portability with other tools and products.

I would like to see better interoperability with the agile scaling frameworks.

When I first started using Azure it was impossible to figure out how to do the configuration correctly. Perhaps there should be a configuration environment that hides some features and is not open for everyone.

I find it difficult to find some of the features, although it may be that they are not enabled, or perhaps I have to take some time to better understand the tool.

I cannot really comment on the scalability of this solution. We are running in a microenvironment with only a few users and a few integrations. It is enough for us at the moment, but if we want to go forward and continue to work with it then that will be a discussion for later.

We have approximately fifty users right now. There are three or four administrators, and the remainder of them are end-users.

I have not contacted technical support. Coincidentally, I needed support today, so I went online to find the answer. The toolkit for helping yourself is there, but perhaps it should be more integrated into the solution.

I have used JIRA for several years, and although I am impressed with the interface in Azure DevOps, JIRA still has better integration with other tools.

The initial setup for this solution is much easier than for that of JIRA.

My advice for anyone implementing this solution is to have an expert for every fifty users of the solution. This person is responsible for configurations and so forth.

If you have a Microsoft environment then this is an easy choice for you, but if you don't then I think that JIRA would be a better choice.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

All of the features related to release management are very good. We use release management and dev management, and the dashboard is good. The ability to specify multiple platforms in release management, by using Docker, is valuable.

Better integration with the Linux operating system would be an improvement for this solution.

I would like to see more third-party plugins; by comparison, the open source solution, Jenkins, has thousands of plugins available.

The Wiki for this solution is not very good.

There is a problem when you want to run a release pipeline for an organization that needs enhanced security. There is no option to configure a dynamic login for a station that is running the tests. The only solution in the platform is to configure an agent that uses a fixed username and password login. There is no option to change the username or password for the login dynamically. If I want to run multiple tests, with different users, then I cannot do it. When it comes to running tests, it needs an option to use different users or authentications. This is a very important feature that is missing.

This solution is very stable.

Scalability is not particularly relevant. It depends on what kind of scaling you want to do. Generally, it has very good support for scaling.

There are hundreds of developers using this solution.

We only had one issue, and I would rate their technical support at medium, based on that experience. The issue was related to shrinking a database, where it was not working well. It took a long time for Microsoft support to fix the problem.

We did not use another solution prior to this one. However, I use other tools in conjunction with Azure DevOps. One of these is Jenkins, for CICD, and I also use the Atlassian Suite.

The initial setup for the latest version was very straightforward. The upgrade was quick and lightweight.

I handled the implementation on my own.

This is a solution that I would recommend.

Azure DevOps is a leading platform, but some things can be better. 

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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.

I like the management features and the user interface is very friendly.

It is not clear what features have been added or enhanced since the last version. My customer used a previous version and it did not meet their expectations, so clarification with respect to the new version is needed on their website or other venues.

I would like to see more customization available to the administrator. You need to change the workflow of the end result.

I did not load the application heavily, but it was stable.

I only tested this solution with a single user. I think that it is scalable, as long as you increase the resources as you move to a larger scale.

I have not been in touch with technical support yet.

The initial setup is very simple.

I performed the setup myself, on my laptop.

I would advise someone considering this solution to use Microsoft because it is very user-friendly, it can run on small levels of applications, can be calibrated to the application, it can be scaled to a larger scale, from small scale to larger scale. It's very stable, you just need to increase the receptors if you need to scale to a larger scale. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.