Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a solution we use here at BDO Digital for Source Control, CI/CD, and NuGet package management. We understand the critical role this suite of tools plays in supporting software development teams, so when Microsoft announced that VSTS users will be automatically upgraded into Azure DevOps projects, it’s understandable that many development teams had concerns about losing certain functionality of VSTS in the transition.

Rest assured, Azure DevOps is the same, trusted solution you’ve grown to rely on. You won’t lose any functionality with the name change, but you will get a design refresh along with a new set of Azure DevOps services!

What’s New in Azure DevOps?

The transition from VSTS to Azure DevOps may be confusing for some users, as Azure and VSTS have traditionally been segmented Microsoft offerings. To help make sense of how VSTS fits into the bigger picture, let’s quickly review the services that are now collectively called Azure DevOps:

• Azure Pipelines: This was formerly “Build & release” in VSTS. It provides CI/CD that works with any language, platform, and cloud. Connect to GitHub or any Git repository and deploy continuously.
• Azure Repos: This was formerly “Code” from VSTS. It provides GIT and TFVS repos for your projects and supports pull requests, advanced file management, and more.
• Azure Artifacts: This was formerly “Packages” from VSTS. It provides Maven, NPM, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources.
• Azure Test Plans: All in one planned and exploratory testing solution.
• Azure Boards: Is a powerful work tracking with Kanban boards, backlogs, team dashboards, and custom reporting.

On the surface, the transition of Visual Studio Team Services to Azure DevOps is nothing more than a name change, however, this rebranding represents the larger transition away from traditional IT towards a DevOps model. “It’s clear DevOps has become increasingly critical to teams’ success,” states Jamie Cool, Director of Programming Management at Azure DevOps. “The services we are announcing today [Azure DevOps] span the breadth of the development lifecycle to help developers ship software faster and with higher quality.” As Microsoft continues to build upon their world-class DevOps platform, we’re excited to see what the future holds!