If you are interested to learn about the DevOps pipelines

Azure DevOps is also known as Microsoft visual studio team services (VSTS). It is a set of collaborative development tools built for the cloud. VSTS was commonly used as a standalone term, and Azure DevOps is a platform which is made up of a few different products. Azure DevOps supports both public and private cloud configurations — the services include:

• Azure Boards — A work tracking system with Kanban boards, dashboards, and reporting
• Azure Pipelines — A CI/CD, testing, and deployment system that can connect to any Git repository
• Azure Repos — A cloud-hosted private Git repository service
• Azure Test Plans — A solution for tests and capturing data about defects
• Azure Artifacts — A hosting facility for Maven, npm, and NuGet packages.

Azure DevOps is everything that needs to turn an idea into a working piece software. You can plan a project with azure tools. The azure pipeline is the CI component of azure DevOps. The azure pipeline is Microsoft’s cloud-native continuous integration server, which allows teams to continuously build, test, and deploy all from the cloud. An azure pipeline can connect to any number of source code repositories such as Azure Repos, GitHub, Tests, to grab code and artifacts for application delivery.

Azure DevOps Server

Azure DevOps Server is a Microsoft product that provides version control, requirements management, reporting, lab management, project management, testing, automated builds, and release management capabilities. It covers the entire application of lifecycle and enables DevOps capabilities.

Azure DevOps can be used as a back-end to the numerous integrated development environments, but it is modified for Microsoft visual studio and eclipse on all platforms.

Azure DevOps Services

Microsoft announced the release of the software as a service offering of visual studio on the Microsoft Azure platform at the time Microsoft called it a visual studio online.

Microsoft offers visual studio, basic, and stakeholder subscriber access levels for the Azure DevOps services. The basic plan is free of cost for up to five users. Users with a visual studio subscription can be added to a project with no additional charge.

Embracing Azure DevOps

One of the main benefits for teams using Azure DevOps is developers will be able to work securely from anywhere and in any format and embrace open-source technology. Azure DevOps addresses the vendor lock-in problem from its early version by providing extensive integration with industry and community tools.

With the many integrations available, users can log in using SSO tools like Azure AD or communicate with their team via Slack integration while accessing both cloud and on-premises resources.

Azure Pipelines offers free CI/CD with unlimited minutes and 10 parallel jobs for every open source project and many of the top open-source projects already use Azure Pipelines for CI/CD, such as Atom, CPython, Pipenv, Tox, Visual Studio Code, and TypeScript.

Benefits of Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps use cases include:

• Planning — Azure DevOps makes it easy for DevOps teams to manage their work with full visibility across products and projects, helping them keep development efforts transparent and on schedule. Teams can define, track, and layout work with Kanban boards, backlogs, custom dashboards and reporting capabilities using Azure Boards.
• Developing — Allows teams to share code and collaborate together with Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. Users can create automatic workflows for automated testing and continuous integration in the cloud with Azure Pipelines.
• Delivery — Helps teams deploy applications to any Azure service automatically and with full control. Users can define and spin up multiple cloud environments with Azure Resource Manager or HashiCorp Terraform, and then create continuous delivery pipelines into these environments using Azure Pipelines or tools such as Jenkins and Spinnaker.
• Operations — With Azure Monitor, users can implement full stack monitoring, get actionable alerts, and gain insights from logs and telemetry.

Pricing

As for Azure DevOps pricing, there are a lot of open-source tools that can be combined to deliver the functionality that Azure DevOps promises to provide, but the basic plan for open source projects and small projects is free up to five users. For larger teams, the cost can range from $30 per month for 10 users to $90 per month for 20 users and so forth.

In summary, Azure DevOps is an all in one focussed project tracking and planning tool mixed with Developer and DevOps tools for writing, building and deploying code that’s relatively quick and easy to use. But, while maintenance cost is decreased, developers only need an active subscription to have constant access to the latest version. Azure DevOps will indirectly utilize Azure Storage and compute services that will increase usage and impact costs.