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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
It would definitely help to see comparisons against competition, e.g. GitLab, CircleCI
("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?)
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?
(Work on VSTS team)
I'm nitpicking though, and I have to say, 10 concurrent jobs and unlimited build time is really generous.
As a long time user of VSTS, I am failing to see how Azure DevOps is different from VSTS. Boards, CI/CD, testing - that's already part of VSTS, and has been for quite some time. Is Microsoft just rebranding for keyword searching or something? Or are there actual technical changes / new features that are being introduced?