Microsoft announced rebranding of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) as Azure DevOps, with a new name, new location and new services. Azure DevOps will allow you to plan smarter, collaborate better and ship faster with a set of modern dev services.
Let's learn what is Azure DevOps, what are the new Azure DevOps services and whether the Azure DevOps is available to all VSTS users.
What is Azure DevOps?
Azure DevOps is the evolution of Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services, which is also known as VSTS. Both the cloud offering provides you tools and process to build and deliver products in an efficient and effective way.
With the Azure DevOps, all other services like Visual Studio Team Services, Team Foundation Server and Azure rolled up into one to give you effective ways to manage your project using Azure Pipelines, Azure Boards, Azure Artifacts, Azure Repos and Azure Test Plans.
Though a new name has been given to Visual Studio Team Services as Azure DevOps, there won't be any loss in the functionalities that VSTS already provided. Along with that, it will have a fresh new design and five new DevOps services for the users at the beginning.
What are the new Azure DevOps services?
The five new Azure DevOps services are as mentioned below, which you can use independently or as part of full DevOps solution:
Azure Pipelines
Using Azure Pipelines, you can connect to GitHub or any Git repositories and deploy continuously using CI/CD.
Azure Boards
It's a powerful tool to track works with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards and custom reporting.
Azure Artifacts
Using the Azure Artifacts you can create, host and share packages with your team and add artifacts to your CI/CD pipelines with a single click.
Azure Repos
It gives you unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repos for your project, so that you can collaborate with your team to create/review pull requests, advanced file management and more.
Azure Test Plans
All in one planned and exploratory testing solution to help you to ship your product with confidence using the manual and exploratory testing tools that Azure DevOps provide.
Is this Azure DevOps available to all VSTS users?
At this initial stage, Azure DevOps is available by default to new users and will be rolled out to old VSTS users gradually over the time based on the feedback.
But that does not mean that the existing VSTS users can't try Azure DevOps. If you are an existing user, you can directly navigate to "http://dev.azure.com/[YOUR_ID]" instead of accessing your old dashboard at "http://[YOUR_ID].visualstudio.com".
If you are a project/organization administrator, you can force your users to automatically redirect to the new location. In future Microsoft will auto redirect to Azure DevOps site if you don't do this now.