What is Azure DevOps? A Complete Overview

The future looks brighter for everyone in the DevOps industry. Do you know why? According to research undertaken by Slintel, Azure DevOps has a market share of about 8.89%. The demand for DevOps tools has grown as automation technologies have advanced across various industry sectors. Enterprises are adopting Azure DevOps solutions for speedy development and deployment as software upgrades become more critical in a digitally empowered environment.  

The pandemic has forced organisations across public and private sectors to switch to the hybrid work policy. This has led to increased collaboration and information exchange across several departments. The Azure DevOps market is booming as organisations quickly adapt to distributed work environments.   

Azure DevOps is a software as a service (SaaS) platform which offers DevOps practices and tools for the entire software life cycle. It is a set of modern services which is used to: 

a) Plan smarter 

b) Collaborate better 

c) Ship faster 

So, this is a development lifecycle of any product. First, you must plan, then work, and lastly deploy. Now, let us dive deep into answering all that you need to know about Azure DevOps. 

Table of Contents

1) What is Azure DevOps?  

2) When was Azure DevOps Launched?  

3) What can Azure DevOps Server do?  

4) How can Azure DevOps benefit you?  

5) Let us now see about Microsoft certified Azure DevOps Engineer.  

6) Want to build a career in Azure DevOps  

7) Conclusion

What is Azure DevOps? 

Azure DevOps is a continuous delivery platform and orchestrator from Microsoft available as an on-premises server and cloud-based Software-as-a-Service product. It provides an end-to-end toolchain for developing and deploying software. Azure DevOps is hugely popular because it offers flexibility, supporting any language, running on any platform, and deploying to any cloud.  

Check out our Azure DevOps course online right away to learn more.  

Azure DevOps integrates with most leading CI/CD tools, allowing teams to stick to tried-and-tested tools. Azure DevOps comprises a range of services covering the entire development life-cycle, including: 

Azure boards- Azure Boards are a flexible tool for planning, task management, reporting, and visualisation. Azure boards ensure work tracking while allowing you to work with backlogs and custom reports.  

Azure Pipeline- Azure Pipelines is a CI/CD platform that runs on Kubernetes or containers and is independent of languages, platforms, and clouds. The Azure platform includes a pipeline that allows you to build, test, and deploy programmes constantly. This is why everyone likes Azure DevOps since it is flexible and adaptive to use in tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and Terraform. 

Azure Repos- Private Git sources are hosted in the cloud by Azure Repos. There are infinite cloud-hosted private Git repositories to pull, push and commit your changes in storage. 

Azure Artifact- Azure Artifacts is a store that contains all the artefacts produced by your development and deployment. With Azure, you can create, host, and distribute packages among your team members. 

Azure test Planning- Azure test plans include integrated planning and exploratory testing (i.e., testing performed to evaluate the software by testers, developers, product owners, UX teams, and others without using test plans, test suites, or test cases). You may improve your code's quality by testing it. 

Try our Microsoft Azure training to know more about Azure! 

When was Azure DevOps Launched? 

Although it was introduced in October 2018, Azure DevOps is familiar to the DevOps scene. Its ancestry may be traced back to the 2006 release of the Visual Studio Team System. Over 80,000 Microsoft employees utilise this advanced tool, which has many features. Azure DevOps covers over 15 years of investment and learnings in providing tools to support software development teams.   

Azure DevOps studio was released in 2005 and developed by Microsoft. DevOps was renamed from Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) in 2015 after updating VSTS. Azure DevOps only works with the Microsoft Windows operating system. The most recent version of the Azure DevOps server is 2019.0.1 Patch 1, which was released on July 9, 2019.
 

What can Azure DevOps Server do? 

Azure DevOps Server is built with an SQL Server backend. When customers need their data on their network, they typically prefer the on-premises version of Azure. Azure DevOps Server tools and data interact via SQL Server reporting services VTFS or Visual Studio Team Foundation Server when necessary. 

Combining adaptability and accessibility 

Users can combine their required anAccess to additional features- Azure DevOps provides DevOps teams with powerful and more potent tools. Microsoft keeps no layers for its customers as they release new features every three weeks. 

Upgrading cycle is no longer needed- Upgrades are a common headache for businesses using on-premises CI/CD tooling. By switching to an Azure DevOps SaaS model, you can stop worrying about patching and toolchain upgrades. 

Reliable Azure DevOps- Azure DevOps is consistent since it provides global accessibility, elasticity, and 24-7 backup. 

Azure DevOps is platform and cloud neutral- Azure DevOps supports any language and operating system, including iOS apps, Android, Python, Node.js, C/C++, Java, .NET, Ruby, and PHP. Azure DevOps supports AWS and GCP's cloud services.d preferred tools and services with Azure DevOps Server using open standards like REST APIs and OAuth 2.0. 

Azure DevOps Server Express free version 

A single Azure developer or up to five Azure developers can use Azure DevOps Server Express for free. Individually or in teams of no more than five, without charge. It can be set up without a dedicated server on your computer or laptop. 
 

How can Azure DevOps benefit you? 

Azure DevOps provides DevOps teams with robust tools that offer many benefits to the users. Let’s look into a few: 

Gain Hands-on knowledge in Continuous Delivery with our experts. Register today! 

Let’s now talk about Microsoft-certified Azure DevOps Engineer 

A Microsoft Certified Azure DevOps Engineer is considered an expert in the DevOps team. What makes an Azure DevOps engineer exceptional to be called an expert? The Azure DevOps engineers have subject matter expertise in working with people, processes and products. They consistently add value to the organisation.   

Azure DevOps engineers design and implement strategies (DevOps roadmap) for collaboration, code, source control, security, continuous integration, testing, delivery and monitoring. Azure DevOps engineers work on cross-functional teams that consist of developers, site reliability engineers, and Azure administrators.  

Candidates for Azure DevOps certification must have hands-on experience in administering and developing in Azure, with a strong skillset in mastering some of the courses mentioned below: 

1) Microsoft Certified Azure DevOps Engineer Expert 

2) Microsoft Certified Azure Fundamentals 

3) Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate 

Want to build a career in Azure DevOps? 

Here is a list of jobs in Azure DevOps and the associated salaries: 
 

Conclusion 

By integrating teams, procedures, and technology to produce an ever-evolving software development lifecycle (SDLC), Azure DevOps has opened the path for quicker and more agile software development processes. We had a brief idea in this blog - What is Azure DevOps? How useful it is, its features, why the world needs to switch to Azure DevOps, and much more. The Knowledge Academy platform offers a wide range of DevOps Training courses for freshers and IT Professions. So, get started with DevOps today!