At the beginning of June, it was rumored that Microsoft was looking to acquire GitHub and, a few days later, the deal was sealed for $7.5 billion, up from initial estimates of around $2 billion. Since then, the move may have left people wondering what intentions the company had for its existing project collaboration and code management platform, Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS).
Now, the future of VSTS appears to be clearer according to an announcement on the Azure blog which has outlined the service"s evolution into Azure DevOps, comprised of a number of separate modules that are compatible with public and private cloud instances, specifically:
Azure Pipelines
CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any Git repository and deploy continuously.Azure Boards
Powerful work tracking with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting.Azure Artifacts
Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.Azure Repos
Unlimited cloud-hosted private Git repos for your project. Collaborative pull requests, advanced file management, and more.Azure Test Plans
All in one planned and exploratory testing solution.
Existing users of VSTS will have their existing projects upgraded automatically over the coming months with no loss of functionality. Meanwhile, users of Team Foundation Server (TFS), the on-premises offering enterprises choose when they want to keep data captive within their network, will morph into Azure DevOps Server upon the next major release.
There will, however, be a few things to consider as part of the forthcoming changes:
- URLs will change from abc.visualstudio.com to dev.azure.com/abc. We will support redirects from visualstudio.com URLs so there will not be broken links.
- As part of this change, the services have an updated user experience. We continue to iterate on the experience based on feedback from the preview. Today we’re enabling it by default for new customers. In the coming months we will enable it by default for existing users.
- Users of the on-premises Team Foundation Server (TFS) will continue to receive updates based on features live in Azure DevOps. Starting with next version of TFS, the product will be called Azure DevOps Server and will continue to be enhanced through our normal cadence of updates.
If you want to find out more, you can catch the Azure DevOps keynote roughly four hours from now at 0800 hours Pacific Time (1100 hours Easter Time, 1500 hours UTC). A Mixer workshop and interactive Q&A session will take place next week on September 17 at 0830 hours Pacific Time (1130 hours Easter Time, 1530 hours UTC).