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The pressures on organizations for IT infrastructure agility, speed to innovate, enhanced collaboration, and greater visibility in Product Engineering dynamics have become more prevalent than ever before. To achieve this, enterprises are pulling strings together in the software development framework and infrastructure management processes. They are moving away from traditional practices and embracing a revolutionary methodology i.e. the benefits of DevOps in software development to achieve accelerated speed-to-market.
In their journey, they are increasingly adopting new ways to break down siloed infrastructure components, automate their end-to-end DevOps datasets, and leverage intelligent DevOps platforms. The goal? Agile and streamlined development journey with no compromise on availability (24/7), security posture, and a culture of collaborative mindset.
Azure DevOps is an intelligent move to drive massive business outcomes in the software application development landscape. When embraced as a mindset, the benefits of Azure DevOps multifolds, promising a smooth sailing to widespread digitization by striking the right balance across the IT value chain, from business operations to software development teams, quality engineers, and IT infrastructure operations.
But how? Let’s explore how Azure DevOps streamline the software deployment journey and drive Agile excellence faster.
The transformative power of Azure DevOps in software development
Azure DevOps (formerly Visual Studio Team Services—VSTS) is a new-age tool designed by Microsoft. It enables businesses to plan software deployment smartly, collaborate within multi-functional teams better, and deliver quality (more reliable) applications faster by combining people, applications, processes, services, and infrastructure
Azure DevOps, as a comprehensive solution, with its ground-breaking CI/CD capabilities help DevOps teams within an organizational ecosystem to bridge the gap between project tracking, software development and business operations. All services and tools of this Cloud Computing platform are supported by Agile methodologies, deep customization possibilities, coding integration through Git, cross-platform compatibility, and greater scalability scope.
Companies are leveraging this build-and-deploy Microsoft software to reduce their delays in application lifecycle management (ALM). Azure DevOps benefits drive increased software quality by quickly synergizing the entire design, development, deployment, operations (testing + maintenance), governance, and project management with the changing industry dynamics.
It ensures improved connectivity and IT agility by halting problematic challenges faster everywhere, right from version control and Agile planning to release management, infrastructure provisioning, Source code Control management (SCM), and dashboard management. This helps eliminate downtime with a 99.9% uptime, drives maintenance-free business operations with rock-solid security, and provides a Single Source Of Truth (SSOT) for seamless integration.
What’s particularly most fascinating about this flagship integrated development environment from Microsoft is the capability to
- Outperform the changing market dynamics and fuel innovation
- Retire obsolete legacy infrastructure and traditional security posture
- Handle decoupled applications and lack of scalability capabilities
- Eliminate high dependencies on third-party components
- Drive continuous delivery and release automation
Ready or not, Azure devOps is already seeping into the modern-age application lifecycle framework and providing enterprises a greater capacity for innovation across the software engineering cadence. Let’s delve deeper into what makes Azure DevOps imperative for Agile enterprises and why it scores highest compared to integration experts in the software development landscape.
Top Azure DevOps benefits: Why Azure DevOps for Software Development is a smarter approach
Here are the key benefits of DevOps that particularly set this Software as a Service (SaaS) platform - Azure DevOps distinguishes as a smarter choice for building and deploying applications:
1. Seamless integration with Azure services and tools
The platform comes with a comprehensive toolchain, which makes integration of Azure DevOps seamless with numerous tools and services. This expansion of the DevOps toolset provides a cohesive application deployment environment where the development team can optimally utilize Azure's capabilities to cater unique project needs.
2. Friciontless automation with Azure pipelines
With automation being the heart of everything in the app development lifecycle, companies often struggle to maximize their productivity and enhance software delivery excellence. Azure DevOps solves this challenge through Azure pipelines. It comes with an integrated set of features that ensure complete support for build automation, testing, and simultaneous release management. Using Azure pipelines, the SDLC team can create workflows by quickly defining build agents and automate run test tasks whenever anyone checks in code changes. The result is Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) with seamless support for containers or Kubernetes.
3. Improved source control with Azure Repo
Managing codebases has become easier with Azure Repos. It is a smart version control system powered by a set of version control tools. The Azure Repos allow collaboration on code along with merging and testing the changes in the codebase implemented, enabling faster release time by pushing the changes into production. What’s more? Azure's code repository management tool is compatible with Git and Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC), enabling developers in the software development ecosystem to manage files within folders, branches, and repositories in both systems using features like collaborative pull requests and advanced file management.
4. Component management and code sharing with Azure Artifacts
As the name indicates, Azure Artifacts is a smart extension to Azure DevOps functionality, enabling developers to create, store, and share packages (fully integrated development artifacts) within their CI/CD pipelines from one place at an ease of a single click. Be it Maven, npm, NuGet, or Python, this package management feature helps Product Engineering experts efficiently manage all their dependencies related to component management and code sharing from public registries and private sources.
5. Gain visibility and traceability with Azure Broards
To speed up with the fast-paced needs in the Application Development landscape, Agile transformation is a key to success. However, the roadmap to going Agile is never easy and requires significant effort. Azure Boards streamlines the entire journey of Agile transformation through drag-and-drop sprint planning. It enables software development teams to gain maximum visibility by tracking work across Kanban, Agile, and Scrum boards. Powered by many interactive and customized tools, Azure Boards provides native support for end-to-end traceability across backlogs using customized team dashboards. From planning to product release, it helps the SDLC team run sprints, stand-ups, plan meetings, and gain valuable project insights using powerful analytics functionality and dashboard widgets.
Azure DevOps versus popular DevOps tools: A comparison highlighting differentiators
Presently, there is a gamut of options for popular devOps tools. Among all, Microsoft Azure devOps has emerged as a standout player in the product development and deployment game. Let's delve deeper into the common differentiators resting on specifics like integration capabilities, visibility and monitoring, automation, user-friendly interface, and cost-effectiveness.
Here’s a comparison breakdown:
| Azure DevOps | CircleCI | GitHub | Jenkins | GitLab | Travis CI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Integration and Compatibility | Ensures a cohesive development experience through seamless integration across its toolkit | Supports different version control systems and deployment platforms | Support seamless integrates with numerous third-party tools and services. Also, it is compatible with different platforms and IDEs | Highly extensible with a vast array of plugins, allowing integration with diverse tools. | Ensures extensive integration with third-party tools. Also, it supports built-in integrations for CI/CD pipelines. | Supports integration with GitHub and GitLab repositories.It ensures seamless integrations with other tools through APIs. |
| Scalability and Flexibility | Scales effectively from small teams to large enterprises, offering flexibility | Suitable for scalable CI/CD pipelines, accommodating the needs of growing projects | Ideal for projects of all sizes. Supports enterprise-level scalability | Highly scalable and flexible, adapting to the size and complexity of projects | Supports self-hosted options for greater scalability and ensures high flexibility via CI/CD pipelines | Ideal for small to medium-sized projects.It has limited flexibility due to predefined CI/CD configurations |
| Collaboration and Communication | Integrated tools like Boards, Repos, and Pipelines | Shared configurations and visualizations of builds | Its user-friendly interface facilitates better collaboration through pull requests, code reviews, and project boards | Shared configurations and build artifacts | Ensures robust collaboration via merge requests, code reviews, and issue tracking | Supports basic collaboration using pull requests and limited communication tools |
| Automation Capabilities | Comprehensive automation with CI/CD pipelines and extensive integration | Customizable workflows and parallelism | Automate workflows within GitHub repositories and support integrations with third-party automation tools | Vast plugin support for building, testing, and deployment | Powerful CI/CD capabilities with full support for automated testing, deployments, pipelines and security scanning | Supports automation through CI/CD pipelines and ensures seamless integration with GitHub and GitLab repositories |
| Cost-Effectiveness | Flexible pricing models | Pricing based on usage | It is not open source and has flexible paid plans for private repositories | Fully open-source and free-to-use DevOps tool | Most functionalities are available for free with paid tiers options available for additional features | Available as open-source platform with paid options for private repositories and additional features. |
Navigate barriers to continuous software delivery efficiency with Kellton
At Kellton, our team helps you become an Agile enterprise by integrating Continuous Delivery into your end-to-end development process - irrespective of Cloud, language, and platform. From smart DevOps consulting to release management and Azure automation services, we streamline your Azure DevOps transition and maximize Azure DevOps benefits for businesses through automation, standardization, and a centralized orchestration of every necessary step within the SDLCs.
With a rigorous and sustained program execution at our dedicated center of excellence (CoE), Kellon not only helps in speeding up product releases, but we leverage Azure DevOps intelligent integration capabilities to increase your uptime, reduce product time-to-market, deliver superior customer experience, enable touch-less software deployments, and reduce technical debts. Learn more about our industry-led Azure DevOps expertise here.
