Our thoughts on the future of digital innovation and the cloud.
Azure DevOps (ADO, formerly VSTS) has become a powerful tool for anyone developing on the Microsoft stack of technologies in the past couple of years, especially for those leveraging the Azure platform. Azure DevOps is, for the most part, a software management tool for agile software development. But its capabilities go way beyond that; we find that it’s especially useful for building infrastructure.
1. Ease of working with Microsoft stack
For those who are already invested in development with the Microsoft stack of technologies, utilizing native tools from Microsoft in your entire process gives you a leg up in tying everything together nicely. Tools such as Teams, SharePoint and Azure can be used together to push code into production easily.
2. Automate and Deploy entire Environments
In software development, leveraging CI/CD pipeline for deploying code isn’t anything new. But what is sometimes overlooked is that CI/CD pipeline can also be leveraged for deploying infrastructure, or using infrastructure as code, so to say. This means building an entire environment, whether its production or dev test from scripts or templates. This is where ADO as a cloud platform excels in enabling consistency and enforces standards for this type of work, allowing for deployment of an entire environment (production, QA, dev, staging, etc.) without leaving the tool.
3. Integration with surface level applications and between different platforms
While ADO is mostly a tool for the “technical” ones to push code into production, its benefits go beyond just the “technical level.” Microsoft has added a wide range of integration in the past couple of years, making it easy to bring DevOps’ advantages to other aspects of the organization (for example, custom forms that link back to DevOps).
4. Living, Breathing Tool
All of the above being said. We think it’s one of the most promising aspects of this tool because it is a living, breathing tool that Microsoft is consistently improving by taking feedback and contribution from the community that uses it.
This only scratches the surface of what Azure DevOps is capable of. If you are interested in learning more about this tool, join the professionals of Invero on February 25 at 9:30 am (PST) for an in-depth webinar and on implementing Azure DevOps. Our Senior Cloud Solutions Consultants will take a deeper dive into the platform and demonstrate how you can automate cloud infrastructure deployment by leveraging the functionality built into Azure DevOps.
