Microsoft Steps Up Cloud-Neutral DevOps Strategy With Azure Pipelines

Microsoft wants to make its development tools open and available for users across any platform or cloud.

To that end, the cloud giant introduced Azure Pipelines Monday, a service that lets developers continuously build, test and deploy any workload to any environment.

Azure Pipelines offers flexible deployments to any platform and cloud, including Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform. It also offers cloud-hosted agents for Linux, macOS, Windows, workflows with native container support, as well as to Kubernetes, virtual machines, and serverless environments, according to a blog post by Jeremy Epling, principal group program manager for Azure DevOps.

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"Microsoft is committed to fueling open-source software development. Our next step in this journey is to provide the best CI/CD experience for open-source projects," Epling said.

Azure Pipelines is giving developers unlimited CI/CD continuous integration/continuous delivery) minutes and 10 parallel jobs to every open-source project for free, starting Monday. Azure Pipelines has its own app in the GitHub Marketplace, and developers can start running CI/CD for all repositories after installation of the app in their GitHub account, according to Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft.

"All open-source projects run on the same infrastructure that our paying customers use,” Epling said. "That means you’ll have the same fast performance and high quality of service. Many of the top open-source projects are already using Azure Pipelines for CI/CD, such as Atom, CPython, Pipenv, Tox, Visual Studio Code, and TypeScript — and the list is growing every day."

Microsoft's blog published Monday further highlights how the company is breaking up its Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), its application life-cycle management system, as the company pushes its DevOps strategy aimed at making development tools more neutral to any workflow or platform. The services are being split into five Azure services, with Pipelines being one of the five new offerings.

Also being offered are Azure Boards, a work tracking system; Azure Artifacts, a hosting facility for Maven, npm, and NuGet packages; Azure Repos, a cloud-hosted private Git repository service; and Azure Test Plans for managing tests and retaining data. Developers will be able to use one or more of the new offerings, without having to buy or use the entire VSTS portfolio.