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.

I have been working with it for different projects and purposes. I'm basically the main architect for such solutions.

It is stable. I like Azure a lot. All our guys are Microsoft certified. 

It is fairly new, so there are a lot of changes, and because it keeps on changing, you need to adapt to those changes.

Its setup is quite complex.

It is stable.

We never used Microsoft's technical support. We always get it right.

Its initial setup is quite complex. There are a lot of caveats. Even if I can call a setup out of the box, it is not really out of the box.

We managed everything on our own. It involved fitting other products with the existing product. If you don't encounter problems, you're not going to learn.

We are 100% satisfied with it. I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We use Microsoft Azure DevOps for applications that analyze data and the data scientist creates the test data for the manual and automatic application tests. Here in Europe, we need anonymous synchronization of all data for testing.

We create special applications for creating data for direct tests.

Microsoft Azure DevOps has been very good for creating pipelines, and all the solutions for creating task management for developers and for the business. 

All of the tests of the applications are done on the mobile or web interface and it could be improved.

The connection to Power BI could improve. Power BI is a very good platform for reporting and presenting processes, but a good engine does not exist to present the process development in time in Power BI. It's a typical business reporting tool.

I have been using Microsoft Azure DevOps for approximately one year.

Microsoft Azure DevOps is highly stable.

There are two options to build. The first option is to build in the cloud, which is very stable but not quickly. The second is to build the systems in the local networks. 

We have 5 to 10 people using this solution in my organization. We have three DevOps and the others are the QA cluster.

We do not use support from Microsoft, we have not had any problems.

The initial setup of this solution was complex. Every part of the implementation was difficult.

For us to implement our production it took approximately 10 to 20 sprints. One sprint is two weeks.

We require a three-person team for the maintenance and support of the solution.

The price of the solution is expensive.

All people who work on projects must have good staff in development in .net, and need to have certificates. The minimal certificate is the AZ-204 Azure developer, it is obligatory.

I rate Microsoft Azure DevOps a nine out of ten.

We use it for planning, pipeline management and testing, as well as using it as a CI/CD tool.

I like the agile management of projects, running stand-ups and the like. The pipeline management feature is great.  

We'd like to see an improvement in reporting across multiple projects. The same applies to improving program visibility so that project managers can get that pane of glass to assist with their work. It would be a big win for a lot of users as well as a good addition to the tool. 

We've been using this solution for close to four years. 

The solution is stable. There are still the occasional issues but on average it's very stable. 

The solution is easily scalable because it runs on the cloud and everything is managed by Microsoft. We don't do anything in terms of increasing capacity so when more users are added the increased capacity is automatically managed. 

We haven't made a lot of calls to technical support but when we have their response has been good and quick. 

We have a DevOps engineer who carried out the implementation for us and I believe it was relatively easy. 

I rate this solution eight out of 10.

We use Microsoft Azure DevOps for our source control, change request management, and a small amount of Wiki.

Microsoft Azure DevOps has helped our organization from having completely automated builds. The developers can send their own code to QA without needing a release manager or lead or IT person moving the code over.

The dashboards need bigger with better extensions and layouts. There isn't a workflow related to the statuses on the dashboard. It only lists the statuses. You can have one started, and once done, but everything in between is only in progress and could be in any order you want, it lacks flow.

I have used Microsoft Azure DevOps for approximately one year.

Last week the builds did stop working for some unknown reason, and then started again. Most of the time the stability is fine, but there are occasions when there's a problem on Microsoft's side, where it creates problems for us.

The solution is scalable but you have to pay for it.

We have approximately 40 people using this solution consisting of developers, QAs, and product owners. We are extensively using this solution in our organization.

I wish the dashboards and the release process were integrated better. The use of Kanban dashboards could be a lot better. They don't have a Kanban dashboard. They have a dashboard with one sprint but it's not exactly the same as a Kanban dashboard. You are not able to do much with them. 

We have not needed to contact the support.

The installation is straightforward. We can create a whole new organization in less than a day.

We did the implementation ourselves. I do most of the maintenance but it is mostly maintenance-free.

There are additional costs for some functionality, such as increased scalability.

My advice to others is for them to do their research before implementing this solution.

I rate Microsoft Azure DevOps a seven out of ten.

We're using Azure DevOps Services for three things: First, for project management, second, for storing the source code, similar to GitHub Repository, and finally, we use it as our CICD build server or build environment, which builds for us and runs tests and so on. In general, these are the three main use cases for this product. We are large customers of Microsoft and we're on a corporate level with them. We pay extra for support. I'm a software engineer manager. 

I like that this solution is all-in-one, a one-stop-shop, it's the killer feature. I haven't seen anything that comes close. I guess GitHub will be close soon, but that's it, there's really nothing right now for that full integration. Other solutions require three tools so this is really a great feature. The solution has a better user interface and better CICD tools compared to what we used previously when we ran TeamCity. I think it scores higher on most things, including better developer ergonomics. Since it's Git-based, there's no training because everyone uses Git. I've found it to also be very customizable so that on all points it's better. This is an important tool for us. 

This solution is not as good as Jira when it comes to project management and I think they know it, but it's good enough. I'm very used to it now, so I can work more quickly, but I've had colleagues who are very Jira-focused and they don't like Azure DevOps at all. When it comes to the handling of tickets or tasks or the product backlog, Jira is much more customizable and more intuitive. It's an area that Microsoft could improve. 

The instructions could be a little better. We are doing some weird stuff where we're building some things, including embedded firmware. It wasn't super intuitive to set that up which was an issue although it's something minor and we managed to solve it. I just expected it to be a little easier, although it's not what the solution is built for. We're going a little out of the normal use case. It is a little clunky compared to Jira and hosting your own builds could be a little easier.

I'm aware that they're putting money into GitHub to add more features around vulnerability scans and statical analysis and so on, basically taking on cloud and what have you, as well as Vericode that we are using. It would be great if it was built into the tool. I get things from other vendors that are provided out of the box, and it would be awesome for me to have that with DevOps. 

I've been using this solution for several years. 

The stability of the solution is good. We've had a couple of dashboards out and they have a nice page share where they show what's out and what's not. A few months back they had some issues with the Active Directory and we were pretty much locked out of some things. We lost Teams for a while and we use that a lot in Azure DevOps. It was quickly fixed. Otherwise, I'm very happy with the stability. 

The scalability of the solution is good and there's no maintenance required. We're a small operation and we could grow by a factor of 10 and it wouldn't be a problem. This is an SaaS and if you need to take care of it, there's something wrong. We use the solution extensively and soon we'll have almost every piece of software, including all our test automation and embedded firmware there so we'll be increasing usage. 

The company previously used TeamCity, and I have used Jenkins in the past, the grandfather of everything. Azure DevOps is nicer. Jenkins is very configurable, but a pain. I like Azure a lot more and I think this or something like it, GitHub Actions, for example, is the future.

The initial setup is very intuitive. What I think they could work on is the whole permissions model where you have projects and other things which require permissions and which is not very intuitive. You can do almost everything but I want a more granular permissions model that's also easy to maintain. I don't quite like the way it's set up so there's some work to be done there. I think I'd rather do it in text because it's hard to see everything clearly otherwise. If you have a complex permissions system, it's complex to set up and it's not super intuitive. Compared to AWS, which is a very different system, that aspect of Azure is not very intuitive.

I work in an engineering department so we didn't feel the need to get any help with deployment. If you read the manual, create the sandbox, and test it out you're able to roll it out. It's not that hard. 

We're not paying a lot for this product. As developers, we have a Visual Studio license which is basically free. That's how their licensing model works. Then we have a number of stakeholders who need to do edits in the system, but not work with code necessarily. I believe they're paying $5 a month per user. We also have users who only need to read things and don't need code so I set that up for everyone who needs it. We're probably paying a few hundred dollars per month altogether. That's a minor cost for us; we're not currently hosting anything on cloud, so it's a small cost compared to hosting a solution. 

We ran into a few things where we had to pay more because of the number of concurrent building agents. We had capped it low and the developer was unhappy so we paid a little more to get what we needed and that's been good. I don't like it when you get a big bill and you don't know about it. 

I'm somewhat critical of the documentation for certain things, but overall, the documentation is really good. In general, Microsoft is really good at documentation. It's worth taking a few hours to read it and then you'll know a little about how Access works. If you set up a sandbox, you're not going to destroy anything and you'll learn by trying things out. I would still read the documentation and go in parallel so you can at least know enough and be aware that it's safe to get in there.

We are very heavy users in creating small projects and then sometimes deleting them because they weren't useful but I like that model. Create a little sandbox and go build. We have done our own workflows and they are always tested in a sandbox before going live. That would be my suggestion. 

I rate the solution eight out of 10.  

The plugins are the biggest thing. I like how Visual Studio is designed as a shell application, and then the plugins make it do what you want it to do.

Microsoft could improve Visual Studio by making it easier to find the plugins you need to get your job done. Maybe they could implement an AI search instead of a simple tech search. Sometimes, people come up with a catchy name for something, and you don't know how it's spelled. For example, a developer might come up with a packet wizard and spell weird, like P-A-K-I-T.

I've been working with Microsoft Visual Studio since it first came out in 1997, so about 24 years.

Visual Studio is very stable.

I don't think scale applies to Visual Studio because it's a developer tool. And I haven't had a lot of experience with massive projects where multiple teams are working on the same source code. I've only worked on a team of a few people.

I think support is probably pretty decent, but I've never had to use it. I just look at Visual Studio's source code to troubleshoot it. 

The setup is pretty straightforward. Visual Studio runs pretty fast.

I'd say Visual Studio is a nine out of 10. If you're thinking about adopting Visual Studio, research the kind of functionality you need. The nice thing about Visual Studio Code is that it's a modular design. So if you're working on a strange language that has a different syntax, you can just get a plugin that'll format your code for you based on the language it's in.

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.