What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software.
It also integrates with the most-leading tools on the market and is an excellent option for orchestrating a DevOps toolchain.
What does Azure DevOps provide?
Azure DevOps includes a range of services covering the complete development life cycle.
- Azure Boards: agile planning, work item tracking, visualization, and reporting tool.
- Azure Pipelines: a language, platform, and cloud-agnostic CI/CD platform-supporting containers or Kubernetes.
- Azure Repos: provides cloud-hosted private git repos.
- Azure Artifacts: provides integrated package management with support for Maven, npm, Python, and NuGet package feeds from public or private sources.
- Azure Test Plans: provides an integrated planned and exploratory testing solution.
Also, you can use Azure DevOps to orchestrate third-party tools.
What if we are not a Microsoft / Microsoft .NET organization?
Azure DevOps is not focused on organizations that are end-to-end Microsoft or Windows.
Azure DevOps provides a platform that is:
- Flexible: you do not have to go 'all in' on Azure DevOps. It is possible to adopt each of the services independently and integrate them with your existing toolchain; most popular tools are supported.
- Cross-Platform: designed to work with any platform (Linux, macOS, and Windows). Or language (including Node.js, Python, Java, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, .NET, Android, and iOS apps). Azure DevOps is not aimed at organizations building and shipping on the Microsoft technology stack.
- Cloud Agnostic: continuous delivery is supported to AWS, GCP, and Azure.