Team Foundation Server / Azure DevOps

The Challenges

• How do I make my software lifecycle efficient and effective?
• I need data for when and where the build, testing, or deployment process succeeds or fails.
• I need to make sure my team members know what tasks need to be done and who’s assigned to do them.
• I don’t have (or want) the equipment to do this on-premises.

Do any of these statements sound familiar to you? Multiple developers working on multiple projects – some of them related – in multiple languages that need to be released at different times:  these are all challenges that Azure DevOps and Team Foundation Server can help you meet.

From idea to release

Azure DevOps and Team Foundation Server (TFS) are a collection of software development tools that allow the entire team to work together to on the entire lifecycle, from planning to release to insight gathering.

Both products have the same set of tools – the only difference is that Azure DevOps is hosted in Microsoft Azure, while TFS is hosted on-premises.

These tools are available for teams of any size – small teams as well as enterprises. Even sole developers can use either platform to manage their software and deploy their apps.

With this suite of tools, you can

• Deliver better products with Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)
  Azure DevOps and TFS not only automate the build, testing and deployment of your app, they give you complete traceability to see everything in the build including changes to your code, reviews, and test results. With Azure DevOps tools you can configure a full CI/CD pipeline for any Azure app using your own choice of language and app framework in a few simple steps.

• Deploy code from anywhere
  You can connect both platforms to a variety of source repositories: such as
  • Team Foundation Version Control (TFVC),
  • GitHub,
  • Bitbucket,
  • your private repo, or
  • Subversion

Actions in your pipeline can be triggered from changes to your code or any number of alert criteria. You can build and deploy on your own infrastructure or free Microsoft-hosted Linux, macOS, and Windows agents. Cloud-based load testing lets you test your infrastructure with as much load as you’d like.

• Deploy to any platform
  You can build your apps using Java, .NET, PHP, Python, Ruby, C++ and many more languages. There are hundreds of ready-to-use tasks available to build and deploy any app anywhere from cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, GCP to app stores such as Microsoft, Android, iOS, or to Windows and Linux systems.

• Deployment to VMs made easy
  You can deploy to any machine, whether Windows, Linux, cloud-hosted, or on-premises, regardless of the complex of the network topology. You can also perform rolling updates while ensuring high availability of the app.

• End-to-end traceability
  You can debug and diagnose problems using the built-in symbol server, logs, and test results. You can also track the status of releases and deployments, including commits and work items, in each environment.

How can B2B help?

At B2B Technologies, we can

• Make recommendations for setup of either Team Foundation Server on-premises or Azure DevOps in the cloud
• Configure either platform to your specific requirements.
• Configure deployment workflows for apps targeting Azure.
• Help integrate Azure DevOps or TFS into your current software development lifecycle.