Often the Software companies face the challenges of proving themselves in a competitive and changing market. Software needs to be released rapidly in the market and should be efficient enough to fulfill the needs of users in all aspects.

Software projects include planning, development, and ongoing processes that require the proper techniques and tools to deliver successfully. In addition, ensuring a culture where everyone follows standard procedures and functions can be challenging across development and project management teams.

There are various industry-wide tools but often they resolve only particular tasks within the organization end – to -end process.

Azure DevOps will amalgamate all the DevOps practices and tools required to provide efficient, high – quality and complete solutions for the whole software life cycle. It will ensure continuous delivery to you and your customers.

In this article, we will explore Microsoft’s cloud-based DevOps service, Azure DevOps.

What is Azure DevOps?

DevOps is the buzzword that demonstrates more agile software development processes. In the age of the cloud computing world, where there is increased emphasis on the cloud-native structure, cloud service providers inevitably possess DevOps orchestration toolsets. Microsoft has ensured that cloud migration will allow access to an advanced DevOps toolchain with Azure DevOps services.

Besides this, cloud-based DevOps offers an extensive marketplace allowing for comprehensive third-party ties–ups. It enables the SaaS platform to build DevOps pipelines irrespective of its cloud, language, or platform.

Azure DevOps Core Services

Azure DevOps offers integration features that you can access through a web browser or IDE client. However, your business can use one or more of the following standalone services based on your needs:

1. Azure Boards 
It helps the DevOps teams make a plan, track, discuss work, and deliver value to the customer quickly. It works like a tracking tool with Kanban boards, backlog, dashboards, and reporting. The board contains tools like Bastion, Firewall, Firewall manager, etc.

2. Azure Repos
Azure repo enables access to unlimited cloud–hosted and private Git repositories. It offers attractive features like collaborative pull requests, advanced file management, and many more.

3. Azure Artifacts
It is used in creating, hosting, and sharing packages. Also, it enables the addition of artifacts to the pipelines. Azure Artifacts help the users to share their codes among them and evaluate the packages.

4. Azure Pipeline
CI/CD is a language, cloud agnostic, and platform that can work whenever you need it. It is easily connected to GitHub or any Git provider to deploy continuously to any cloud.

5. Azure Test Plan 
This toolkit enables test management and exploratory testing, giving you the confidence to ship. Azure test plans are all-in-one planned testing solutions that allow you to manage your test effectively.

Azure offers cloud-based DevOps Services

Azure DevOps, a cloud-based DevOps service that offers a rich and robust toolkit to help you create and manage a complete DevOps strategy. It allows users to do the following things:

1. No matter the programming language or technology used, you can cater to your DevOps needs.
2. You can deploy anywhere, from containers to clouds belonging to third parties.

Azure DevOps allows it to do all these things with unmatched scalability and availability and without additional software.

Azure DevOps Advantages

  • Developers can download a free version to help them learn and become productive.
  • Uses various programming languages, platforms, and cloud providers
  • It offers a variety of integrations and collaboration capabilities.
  • Based on Git repositories to manage code
  • You can make it custom (such as with fields).
  • Built-in CI/CD
  • Compatibility with different Microsoft tools
  • SaaS offers regular updates with new features

Is Azure DevOps the Right Solution for Your Business?

Azure DevOps has paved the path toward rapid software development by unifying teams, technologies, and processes to create an ever-evolving software development cycle. Azure DevOps is a mature and feature-rich platform.

Its flexibility and support for different languages make it a viable option for cloud vendors and large-scale organizations.