Buck Hodges on the introduction to Azure DevOps Services - Episode 001

Welcome to the first edition of The Azure DevOps Podcast! Your host, Jeffrey Palermo is joined by guest, Buck Hodges, to announce the global release of Azure DevOps Services. Buck is the Director of Engineering for the Azure DevOps product group and has been at Microsoft for over 15 years.

Azure DevOps Services (previously known as Visual Studio Team Services) aims to help developers ship faster. With Azure DevOps Services comes a full set of services that you can use separately, with other non-Microsoft services, or together as a suite.

In this episode, Jeffrey and Buck dive into all the key differences that come along with the rebranding and new services. Buck also gives a rundown of the system (from how it's organized to how to mix and match with other devops tools on the market) and many of the new, exciting features available for developers.

Episode Sponsor:

Clear Measure is a software engineering firm and Microsoft Gold Partner empowering development teams to be their best. Clear Measure equips developers with the devops tools, methods, and automation necessary to focus on building their applications rather than wrestling with builds, deployments, or environments. Click clear-measure.com to see whether a devops implementation is right for you.

Topics of Discussion:

[:30] About today's topic and guest.

[1:00] Buck Hodges announces the new Azure DevOps Services.

[2:44] Buck's background in DevOps and career progression at Microsoft.

[10:00] Key differences with the rebranding to Azure DevOps, and its 5 main services: Pipelines, Boards, Artifacts, Repose, and Test Plans.

[14:49] Can Jira (and other similar softwares) users adopt Azure DevOps?

[16:48] About Microsoft's commitment to open source and giving back by offering free use of Azure DevOps to run free builds for open source projects.

[20:02] About the ease of getting started with Azure Pipelines through the GitHub Marketplace, and some of the big users with Pipelines.

[20:49] A word from Azure DevOps sponsor: Clear Measure.

[21:19] About the internal transformation of the Azure DevOps team and what it looks like today.

[24:04] How many developers are part of Buck's organization?

[24:54] Buck gives a rundown of the system (how it's organized, how many team projects, how many Git repositories, how many independent services, etc.)

[28:58] Do they build all the services together in the same Git repository or do they split them into different build configurations?

[32:45] What's coming next for Azure DevOps?

[36:34] Buck addresses some general misconceptions.

[40:00] When will customers be able to get their hands on the new Azure DevOps 2019 server?

[41:30] Where to learn more or get started with Azure DevOps.

Mentioned in this Episode:

Azure DevOps

VSTS

Azure Pipelines

Azure Boards

Azure Artifacts

Azure Repose