What is Azure DevOps and why aren't you using it?

 I wanted to answer what the "Azure Devops" Microsoft suite is as many people may not understand the powerful tool that it is and as a former consultant I see a lot of people have a ton of disparate tools when Microsoft makes it easy. 

So - here are 5 reasons to use Azure Devops.

1) Replace JIRA

Azure Boards can replace your backlog in JIRA. If you run an agile team, you probably use Jira - however you can easily use Azure Boards and replace your JIRA backlog. The benefits are that you are buying into the Azure DevOps suite and have one tool to manage your code and backlog. JIRA can be expensive, so it makes sense to start a new project with Azure Boards - no need to default to JIRA.

2) Replace Bitbucket, Gitlab, TFS, etc.

Azure Repos enables users to write to private cloud hosted repos. This way you can not only take advantage of having a Microsoft hosted and private repo, but you can easily integrate with the other tools in the Azure Devops suite like Test Plans & Pipelines.

3) Replace your testing tools like Zephyr.

A tool like Zephyr allows you to integrate tests into your SDLC pipelines, however Azure Test Plans can replace this functionality and easily allow tests as part of your SDLC process.

4) Replace tools like Artifactory

As an Azure Devops engineer you can retire tools like artifactory and instead use the public and private Azure Artifacts to enable package management solutions like npm, and pip server to host your system artifacts.

5) Replace your Jenkins pipelines

Finally, you can get rid of having Jenkins and use Azure Pipelines to run CI/CD. This enables the single plane of glass and allows you to run your code, your tests, and your deployments in the same workflow. 

Buying into this eco-system enables you to have a single pane of glass view of your entire software development lifecycle for a ridiculous value.