Microsoft Corp. Monday effectively rebranded its Visual Studio Team Services software suite for developers, rolling up its tools into a new service called Azure DevOps.

VSTS is a service used by developers to collaborate on code development and deployment. Among its features are Git repositories for storing code and source control, tools for planning and tracking work, build and release management support, extensions for services such as Slack and Trello, and various other Azure services.

Microsoft also said users of Team Foundation Service, which is the on-premises edition of VSTS, will also be rebranded. It will be renamed as Azure DevOps once the next update rolls out.

Because VSTS is basically a cloud service backed by Azure, the rebrand doesn’t come as much of a surprise. The new Azure DevOps Services will “span the breadth of the development lifecycle to help developers ship software faster and with higher quality,” the company said in a blog post Monday. The service supports both public and private clouds, which means developers can run Azure DevOps in their own data centers if they choose.

Azure DevOps is made up of several services including the new Azure Pipelines, which is a continuous integration/continuous delivery service that’s compatible with any programming language, platform and cloud. It offers unlimited minutes and 10 parallel jobs for each open-source project. It can connect to GitHub and other Git repositories, the company said.

A number of existing open source projects are already using Azure Pipelines, including Atom, Cpython, Pipenv, Tox, Visual Studio Code and TypeScript.

Other services in the package include Azure Boards, which provides work tracking via kanban boards, team dashboards, backlogs and reports; Azure Artifacts, which offers Maven, npm, and NuGet package feeds from public and private sources; Azure Repos, for cloud-hosted private Git repositories; and Azure Test Plans, which is a “planned and exploratory testing solution.”

The Azure Devops offerings provide similar functionality to VSTS, which includes CI/CD, boards, Git integration, package management and testing tools.

Azure DevOps is being offered free for open source and small projects with up to five users. For closed projects and larger teams, the price starts at $30 per month for up to 10 users, all the way up to $6,150 per month for 1,000 users.

Microsoft said that “millions” of developers currently using VSTS will be upgraded to Azure DevOps “automatically,” with no loss of functionality. On the contrary, the company said, developers will gain “more choice and control” as the services are designed to “work great together.”

Unfortunately, that increased control won’t extend to the URLs of projects running on Azure DevOps. The URLs for existing projects will be changed from .visualstudio.com to dev.azure.com/abc, with automatic redirects to ensure no broken links.

With the rebrand, Microsoft is essentially modernizing VSTS by offering a cloud-native version of the service, said Holger Mueller, principal analyst and vice president of Constellation Research Inc. It’s a good move made even better by the fact it will keep offering the on-premises Team Foundation Server option as well, the analyst said.

“It’s good to see Microsoft is keeping the [Azure DevOps] offering modular and open, so modules can be used with third-party pieces as this reflects the heterogeneous world of next-generation applications,” Mueller said. “And large enterprises will be glad to see that they are keeping their local Foundation Servers, albeit with a name change.”

Microsoft said TFS, the on-premises version, will continue to receive updates as normal, but they will be based on the new features in Azure DevOps from now on.

Image: Microsoft