What the Visual Studio Online (VSO) rename to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) means

Last week at Connect() Microsoft announced the transition of its Visual Studio Online (VSO) service to the name Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) which better describes the role that it has as the platform for DevOps delivery.  The toolset is intended to be an end-to-end framework for delivering modern applications to customers.  Microsoft is serious about DevOps and this toolset is fully built to engage in the complete development – operations lifecycle.  Here are the things to learn about:

• Ideation.  The toolset allows for the capture of requirements and bugs which generate new ideas for applications, as well as the management of requirements against established applications. With the rate of innovation ever increasing VSTS provides the capability to rapidly capture requirements and deliver on customer needs.

• Planning.  The management of your complete development planning process, including the organization of work, assignment, resource planning, and sprint management.  At Concurrency we use VSTS for all of our projects, including development and infrastructure because it provides us the capability to comprehensively and rapidly serve the needs of our customers.

• Version Control.  A mature version control environment, integrated into either its own code repository or GIT, as well as rich integration into a variety of IDEs. 

• Continuous Integration.  A technology to continually receive builds from developers, integrate them, and test them through code-based testing environments.  This increases the rate of validation to an increased rate of development, especially necessary for modern development for cloud-scale applications.

• Continuous Deployment.  A technology to automate the release management process to continually move validated builds into the production environment in various capacities.  The release management technologies can be enabled to support any rate of deployment and also enables DevOps practices in conjunction with traditional service management practices.

• Performance Testing.  The testing of cloud-based or on-premise applications through continuous test environments, as well as the validation of production applications with application insights and OMS.

If that isn’t exciting enough, the pricing matrix has also been updated, which includes free access for up to five users, with pricing starting at $8/user/month and scaling down to $2/user/month for larger development teams.

We recently presented on these technologies in our DevOps + OMS event video, which you should check out to get an entry-course to VSTS.  We present the entire DevOps lifecycle and associated technologies.

Cheers!