Microsoft Azure DevOps Reviews

We are an application development company, so DevOps helps us manage the work our developers and software engineers do on-site. It's convenient for customers because everybody works from home due to COVID.

DevOps is used within our organization and we also encourage some of our clients who are interested in a development platform to use Azure DevOps, but we have other clients that actually prefer Red Hat or other platforms. We like Azure DevOps, but our cloud environment is AWS. We've done three implementations on AWS without any problem.

Our technical sales staff and business development people need to know how far the developers are on any product that we're developing. DevOps makes it easier for you to see how far along they are with the work because they have a repository where they store everything. There is a portal where you can see what has been done, what has been tested, what is working, and what isn't. I have a huge dashboard with an overview of what the development team is doing from an executive point of view.

I know exactly what they're working on. If the team is falling behind on a project, there's a project management module where I can see exactly what was supposed to be delivered and what hasn't been. 

I can't think of any specific things at the moment, but I've run into things that I didn't like. I came across something that I wanted to be changed in DevOps, but I can't remember what it was. It was a particular feature I was looking for that I couldn't find.

I'm happy with DevOps' stability. I've had problems with the Red Hat environment, but I think it also boils down still to implementation skills. We're a big Microsoft implementer, so we find Azure DevOps to be highly stable.

DevOps is highly scalable. Before one of our clients decided to move to the cloud version of DevOps, they decided to try it in a small environment to see if they liked it. Previously, they had Team Foundation Server running on-premises, and we encouraged them to switch to DevOps. We set up a minimal environment and used it as a typical development environment. It wasn't for testing or anything. It was just a mini development environment that replicated their internal chassis.

Before we started using DevOps, we were using Microsoft Team Foundation Server, which allowed the whole team to share work and collaborate. DevOps does that and a little more.

Most of the time we just leave it on the cloud instead of deploying it on-prem, unless a client requests on-prem. In that case, we just replicate the cloud environment in the on-prem environment. There's no real difference, and we've had some clients who change and say they now prefer to have it on the cloud. 

After the subscription, which took about a day, we had our B environment up and running, and everything was transferred from on-prem to the cloud. In the older days, it would take you about a month. But now, to move, it actually took us, I think, almost a week, because the biggest challenge was moving the data more than the environment. Moving the environment, it took about, I think, a day or two. But the data was a bit of a problem.

The cost of Azure DevOps is manageable. You have the option to purchase a license that is per user. You can choose based on the size of your team. For example, you can opt for a volume enterprise license or go for user-based licensing if you don't have a huge number of users. 

You can start with a smaller package and then scale up as needed. Let's say, for instance, you are a smaller company with about only 10 users of the environment. Then, two months later, you win the Powerball, and you get a billion dollars and bring in a thousand developers.

You have the flexibility to move from a small-team subscription to a big subscription easily. So you don't necessarily have to take the volume. The licensing model covers all three tiers, whereby you can have a volume license, individual users, or groups. 

We are using groups, and we've found it affordable because you cancel their license if someone leaves. When we get a new person, we repurchase the license. We pay a monthly subscription, but the annual licenses are cheaper because of the commitment. 

I rate Azure DevOps seven out of 10. I would give it a higher rating, but there are a couple of things that tick me off.

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.

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.

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.

There are two versions of Azure DevOps: the cloud version and the on-premises version. We use the cloud version in very few situations, but most of our software is based on Azure DevOps on-premises.

We are a software house, and we develop software. We use it to store our source code; that is, it is the repository for our source code.

We have different teams working on different products, and each one uses a different methodology and a different process. Azure DevOps helps with that. For instance, one group may be using Scrum as a methodology to develop their software. The other group could also be using Scrum but with CDCI (continuous development, continuous integration), which helps a lot when you have to develop, test, and deploy the solution.

I think the most usable thing is that you can follow the whole progress of the development process. This makes it very useful for us.

As for improvement, the first one is pricing. For us, luckily because we are partners, it's free. Microsoft gold partners do not have to pay, but if you're not a partner, the product is very expensive.

The second would be that the tool should integrate with some of the competitors. It doesn't matter if it's a big market; it's difficult when you have to integrate with other competitor's tools, like JIRA, for instance.

If you look at the competitor's tools, they integrate easily with Microsoft, but on Microsoft's side, it's not as easy. They have been changing, but still, there are a number of gaps there.

I've got teams that want to use Microsoft Project, not only to control the whole process of the development but also to control the whole project and software. I think Project should be integrated with DevOps.

We have been using this solution for 10 years.

It is very stable. I think the system is down only a couple of hours per year, so it's very stable.

It's very scalable. We started using this solution 10 years ago, and it has evolved, We also have grown our software production, and so far, we have scope with all these situations.

We haven't had any problems with the product, but every time we had some questions, technical support staff answered pretty fast, in less than 24 hours.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

For the deployment, I think we had two people: one person from infrastructure and one who was a specialist in Azure DevOps. For maintenance, because we have about 80 people using this software, we only have one and a half people taking care of the software. That is, the infrastructure person does this part-time. He doesn't spend the whole day taking care of DevOps.

The ROI is very positive for us, but it's difficult to say how it would be if we had to pay for the solution. It's a very worthwhile product, but again, we don't have any comparisons because we don't pay anything for it.

Microsoft Azure DevOps is an expensive solution.

Get to know the product because it is complex and has many different possibilities.

It is worth having it, but you have to have an in-depth understanding and know what it is capable of doing. Otherwise, you're going to install it, and then it will be like having a very nice car in your garage that you don't know how to drive.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Microsoft Azure DevOps at eight.

We primarily use the solution for our internal development and we have some clients that require some consulting around some DevOps functionality.

We use the product for the development process for the repository, for the tracking of the tasks in the boards, and for the pipeline for CINCD.

The test plan is one feature that we are exploring more right now. This is a great feature that we want to deeper into.

We have a solid base. We can do everything with DevOps.

It is possible to add third-party extensions to increase the usability of the product.

The initial setup is very simple. 

We have found the solution to be scalable.

The solution, for the most part, is stable. 

Some things, like project management, tasks, progress, and having work progress views, require us to use some external tools or to create our own internal tools. These are not native to DevOps. It would be ideal if, instead of searching for third-party solutions, they had these feature sets or capabilities included under DevOps. They need to expand the solution's offering.

While I have used the solution for two years, the company has some personnel that have used it for longer. Our development team may have used it for four or five years. 

The product is stable. We had some regional degradations a few months ago, however, it wasn't too much. For the most part, it's reliable and there aren't bugs or glitches. 

The solution is scalable. If we need to expand it we can do so. 

We've never had to contact technical support. I cannot speak to how helpful or responsive they would be, as I've never dealt with them directly. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. It is not difficult or complex. 

We use the online version. We don't have to deploy the tool. We don't have to put in a lot of effort as we already have the pipelines in the TFS. We just move it to Azure DevOps. 

I'm a solution provider. I sell Azure DevOps and I have a client that was looking to analyze some differences between Jira and Azure DevOps. Therefore, I have evaluated Jira a bit for them.

We are both a reseller and a partner of Microsoft.

We always use the latest version of the solution. 

I would recommend this product to other companies and users. If a company or a team doesn't know how to work with Azure DevOps, the advice I would give is to find someone that knows the tool and do a POC first to make sure you understand everything a bit better before diving right in. 

In general, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily use Azure DevOps for the early phase of software development projects. We don't use it for building the software. Rather, it is for development support. It handles management of the features, the composition, the definition of requirements, and checking our requirements against the use cases. 

Since it is a cloud product, it is constantly updated and not the responsibility of the user.

The quality of the user interface is very good.

It is a well-integrated product in terms of the development lifecycle. There are different functional areas from the requirements to finish including test management, product development, and deployment. I do not personally make use of all of these components together, but I understand from my colleagues that make wider use of it that everything integrates nicely.

It lacks integration with Office 365. It would be very useful if it had better integration with Microsoft Word because we would like to be able to define the priority requirement document and add it to different stages of the backlog. Currently, it is difficult to do this. There are some third-party products for this but they are either quite expensive or do not function properly.

I would like to see the requirement management links between work items improved.

An API to develop custom functions would be useful because we work with a large integrator that uses TFS, the on-premises version, and have seen what they do. One of the advantages of it is that you can develop using the XML approach to customization. Essentially, the customizability is more in-depth. This could be done, even without going to the code level, if they provided an API or and SDK. Although the interface currently used for customization is good, we sometimes find it limited. It would be more complex to use but also allow for greater potential.

I have been using Azure DevOps services for two years.

This is a stable service.

I would say that it is scalable. On a recent project, we had a lot of users and did not experience any issues in terms of performance.

I have only been in contact with technical support on one occasion and they gave me a good and prompt answer. From my experience, I can say that I am satisfied.

I do not personally have experience with other products, although the company has some experience with Jira.

In summary, this is a good product but I would like to see better Office integration and API support.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I use it to, for example, build applications. Not just Subnet - also Java or in OGS. I deploy Windows applications and also mobile applications with Visual Studio App Center and Azure DevOps.

Azure services like serverless technology make it quicker and faster to deploy .NET applications, for example. Similarly, the Azure Portal is faster to put in services, for example, with specific functionality. These kinds of features are faster to deploy and to put in functionalities that are specific, which is great.

I like the Azure keyboard. Keyboard permits use, for example, connection streams in secret, in a safe manner. 

Sometimes I use also Azure SQL Database cloud, the serverless functionality. It's also very attractive because you can use something like a GP, like the protection of the data on the cloud. You can put a lot of information there, maybe not with banks, however, with other kinds of clients. 

The ability to have cognitive services is good. For example, I use a lot of Azure DevOps, for example, Cloud, Azure DevOps Cloud, and analytics views with, for example, Power BI on-premise if you have Power BI as a service. There is a lot of pipeline potential with Azure DevOps deploying, for example, Containers, to Kubernetes, Azure Kubernetes Service, and also a lot of Azure Container repositories and Azure Container instances. This is great for quickly deploying SonarQube in a container. These kinds of things are very attractive.

It's a pretty problem-free solution.

When we don't have some permissions, we have to research how to get them. It's not obvious. For example, deploying in order to do the connections, we need permissions for quotes or quotas. A specific quota might depend on an account. Sometimes we don't have the kind of support we need to work things out easily.

When you deploy in Yaml Pilot, for example, you need to note in Yaml how to associate the piling, the release with the word items. We need more information about how this is possible and more flexibility to make it happen. 

My organization is a Microsoft partner.

I have Microsoft certifications. I always develop in Visual Studio, .NET, or Core, and now I work with Azure DevOps and also in Azure Portal.

I deployed in a hybrid environment as the clients have a lot of things on-premises. For example, the databases I use, for example, Redgate, plus Azure DevOps, or Apex with Azure DevOps, to deploy databases. In some cases, a lot of banks prefer their data on-premise. In other cases, I deploy to Azure App Services, for example, in the cloud. Also, I see things with Amazon Web Services and telephone, like multi-cloud.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten as it never gives me any problems.