Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is Microsoft’s suite of services for planning, building, testing and delivering software, succeeding Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server. Software teams need to coordinate work, manage source code, automate builds and releases, and maintain quality, but using disconnected tools for each stage creates friction and gaps in traceability. Azure DevOps addresses this by providing an integrated set of services that cover the complete development lifecycle, which teams can adopt as a whole or individually alongside other tools. Its core approach is to support modern DevOps practices — agile planning, continuous integration and continuous delivery — for any language, platform and cloud, while offering the security, compliance and scale required by enterprises. It is available both as a cloud service and as the self-hosted Azure DevOps Server. This flexibility allows teams to modernise their delivery practices incrementally rather than through a disruptive wholesale change.

The suite comprises Azure Boards for agile planning with Kanban boards, backlogs, sprints and dashboards; Azure Repos for private Git repositories with pull requests and branch policies; Azure Pipelines for CI/CD across Windows, Linux and macOS, with support for containers and Kubernetes; Azure Test Plans for manual and exploratory testing; and Azure Artifacts for hosting package feeds for NuGet, npm, Maven, Python and Universal Packages. An extensive marketplace offers extensions, and integrations connect with GitHub, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Jira, Jenkins and many other tools. Security features include Microsoft Entra ID integration, granular permissions, audit logs and GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps. Azure DevOps is used by development teams of all sizes, from start-ups to large enterprises and public sector organisations. Pricing starts from around USD 6 per user per month for Basic access with a free trial, and a free version is available for small teams.