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Comment by ethomson | Hacker News Reader

PM for Azure DevOps here (formerly VSTS). It is a rebranding, but it's more than merely a rebranding. We're breaking out the individual services so that they're easier to adopt. For example, if you're just interested in pipelines, you can adopt only pipelines.

We've got some neat new features launching today and more coming soon. My favorite new feature is the Azure Pipelines app the the GitHub Marketplace. It makes it one-click to build a continuous integration and pull request validation pipeline right from your GitHub repository, you don't even need an Azure DevOps account to get started.

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As a mostly very satisfied user, I gotta say, y'all have a great product. The CI/CD part of VSTS (I like the old name better :P) is killer and by far my favorite platform to use now. However, I've had my builds break twice out of nowhere with no recourse other than submitting a forum post and hoping someone gets back to me in a reasonable amount of time. I can't imagine going back to another platform, but its really frustrating when your production release process for a client is completely down and you have no way to fix it. Is there a way to get better support in those scenarios?

I'm sorry to hear that - without knowing more about how it broke, it's hard for me to say. Can you give me some more information about how it's broken in the past? Links to the forums posts would be great. Probably the best way to get them to me is by email, it's my HN name @microsoft.com.

Another (mostly) happy VSTS user here, also loving the CI/CD functionality.

I too have had builds break recently out of nowhere:

1. Related to NPM being upgraded on the hosted agent, which was fixed easily enough (after trawling through logs) by forcing the task to use an older version

2. SQL LocalDB connections stopped working, so integration tests couldn't run - this lasted for around 2 weeks!

I also ended up on the Microsoft support forums... unfortunately, responses on those forums from Microsoft staff are invariably late and of infuriatingly poor quality.

I ended up on the VSTS Agent image GitHub site instead, and raising an issue there was far more helpful.

VSTS is a great product, I just really wish there was a decent support option for when things go wrong.

I also wish Microsoft would actively communicate with impacted customers to notify them where there are outages.

Oh, and I wish the hosted build agents ran on better hardware - they are slow, even compared to the smaller Azure VMs. For example, we have a build that takes 14 minutes on the (paid) hosted agent, or 3 minutes on a B2ms Azure VM. Some of that is down to NPM and Nuget package caching, but even the actual msbuild and test stages are much slower.

I'm glad you're mostly happy, but I'm sorry it's only mostly. I hope that we'll improve this. Honestly, the lowest latency mechanism is to hit @AzureDevOps up on twitter (or me personally) and we'll make sure that your problems get routed to the right person.

For outages, you can subscribe at https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vsoservice (in the toolbar on the right hand side). We don't send out email notifications without you opting in, nor will we, but we do have some ideas to improve the way we notify people that we're working on.

And as for build agents, we're working on that, especially around the caching. Appreciate all the feedback.

If the point of the rebranding is to help drive adoption of the individual components of what used to make up VSTS, then it seems to me like the strategy is to try and get people to switch from pre-existing toolsets to Azure tooling.

Maybe it would be more persuasive if you could show some kind of comparison or case study for switching? For instance, if you want to make it easier for people to adopt Azure Boards, then why should they adopt Azure Boards over the myriad other agile planning products out there?

More importantly, if you're trying to make individual services easier to adopt, why is there only unified Azure DevOps pricing and not pricing solely for the individualized products (excepting Azure Pipelines pricing, which is a per-agent pricing model)?

You're right that we need to provide some better comparisons here, but the big reason that I'm excited about making individual components easier to adopt isn't for competition, it's to help people round out what they're missing in a dev tools stack.

There's a lot of shops that are happy with their git hosting provider and their agile planning tool and go looking for a CI/CD tool and may have been turned off by VSTS because it looked like a monolith. Making it clear that you can just use Azure Pipelines without having to use the entire stack was a priority for us, but you're absolutely right that we need to round this out with some better case studies. Thanks for the feedback.

Yeah that would be a good start. There's clear value-add here for on-prem teams which are starting to move to the cloud, by making it easier to run builds both on Azure and on-prem (seeing the $15/month pricing per agent) from the same cloud-based product, which I don't think anybody else is doing yet? But there doesn't seem to be any documentation about how to get that set up?

It would definitely help to see comparisons against competition, e.g. GitLab, CircleCI

Yeah - the hybrid cloud and on-premises build agents is actually one of my favorite features. The open source project that I help maintain (libgit2) uses VSTS's hosted Linux, Windows and macOS build agents, but add support for some other platforms (like ARM) with on-premises build agents.

("On-premises build agents" makes it sound fancier than it is, it's actually Raspberry Pi's on my desk, but hey, whatever works, right?)

We are considering using TFS (now Azure DevOps Server) for CI/CD of database related projects. Curious, how does DevOps handle SQL Database, SSIS, SSRS and SSAS visual studio projects when it comes to CI/CD? We have a custom solution currently in place, but would like to simplify this if possible.

They try to keep me away from the SQL, so I don't have the most enlightened answer, to be honest. But smart people that I trust tell me that Redgate's tools are really excellent for SQL Server and SSRS projects. And that they integrate nicely into a CI/CD pipeline for "Database DevOps".

Does the "pipelines" service support deploying to Kubernetes clusters other than AKS? If/when it does then you have a very compelling service.

It does indeed. You can deploy to Azure (of course) or to AWS, GCP or on-premises.

I assume "Azure Boards" is the same thing as Planner in Office 365?

Is there any specific changes between the two, like for example can you point a changeset at an Azure Boards item from within Visual Studio?

Azure Boards is a powerful work management service designed especially for engineering teams that allows you to not only plan work in a backlog or board view but also link across all your artifacts such as commits, pull requests, builds, even other work items. Yes, it's also integrated into Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code. [Program Manager on the Azure Boards team.]

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