What is Azure DevOps? Introduction to the Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps is a unified platform from Microsoft that combines various developer services to facilitate planning work, collaborating on code development, and building and deploying applications. It can be used as a cloud Software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering or be hosted on an on-premise server. Azure DevOps supports popular extensions for Visual Studio Code and offers several advantages such as maintenance-free operations, access to cloud build and deployment servers, and tight RBAC permission model integrated with Azure AD. However, if data needs to stay within the organization's premises, users may need to opt for the server version of Azure DevOps, which comes with additional management and hosting overheads. Key features include Boards, Repos, Pipelines, Test Plans, Artifacts, Wiki, team dashboards, and notifications. Some popular extensions for Azure DevOps include Slack, Microsoft Teams, Replace Tokens, Azure DevOps Open in Excel, Code Search, Sonarqube, Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Kubernetes, and Bicep. Alternatives to Azure DevOps include GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket.