What’s new for VSTS as announced at Microsoft Build 2018
This week we kicked off Microsoft Build, Microsoft’s premier developer conference laying out the foundation of our newest technology advanced across Cloud, AI, developer tools & service and of course DevOps.
In this post we’ll cover what’s new for both Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Microsoft’s cloud-hosted DevOps service and our on-premises server equivalent Team Foundation Server (TFS).
What’s new at Build 2018
Today’s announcement highlights from Build 2018:
Azure DevOps Project: New feature additions, including support for AKS
Microsoft’s Azure DevOps Projects is designed to quickly enable developers to start running their website or API on Azure infrastructure such as App Service, Service Fabric or Virtual Machine. All new DevOps powered projects are enabled with not just infrastructure on Azure, but a full CI/CD pipeline powered by Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) and it is fully customizable.
Today at Build 2018 we’ve announced that Azure DevOps Project now supports:
- Azure Virtual Machines as a deployment target for your app, this feature is powered by Deployment Groups which is a robust out-of-the-box multi-machine deployment feature of VSTS Release Management
- Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) is now supported for NET Core, Node.js and Java-based apps, with DevOps Project creating the AKS cluster and setting up a DevOps pipeline using Helm Charts
- Azure Service Fabric is now available as a deployment target for many kinds of apps, with more app types support coming in the future
- Azure SQL Databases can now be added to your new apps targeting ASP.NET, with more app types support coming in the future
- Support for two more popular developer choices of programming languages to choose from, supporting Ruby and Go
For more information read the full details in our what’s new in DevOps Project blog post and watch our Node.js or ASP.NET Core getting started videos.
VSTS Release Management: Release Gates (GA), Enabling Progressive Exposure and Phased Deployments
For those not familiar with VSTS, its a Cloud-hosted DevOps service with many capabilities that can work for small teams and scale to huge organizations.
One of its suite capabilities is Release Management (RM) for any app and any platform. Last year at our Connect(); 2017 event we announced a new RM feature called Release Gates which enables data-driven approvals for phased deployments based on monitoring of deployment health through the VSTS powered pipeline.
Today at Build 2018, we’ve announced that:
- Release Gates is now generally available (GA) and production ready!
- We now support extensibility, enabling developers to build their own RM gates and make them available through the Visual Studio Marketplace.
By default Release Gates supports “gating a release” using signals it receives from Azure Functions, REST API’s, Azure Monitor Alerts and VSTS work item queries. You can also see one great example of the extensibility framework in action with the marketplace published Twitter Sentiment analysis extension.
For more information read the full details in our what’s new in VSTS Release Gates blog post and watch our introduction video.
Azure Stack Support from within VSTS Release Management
Microsoft’s Azure Stack is a hybrid cloud computing solution based on our Azure cloud platform and powered by partner hardware.
Azure Stack is designed to help organizations deliver Azure services from their own data center, with a lot of flexibility to run fully on-premises environments or hybrid configuration with Azure cloud in the mix.
No matter which configurations customers want to use, the one thing we aspire to deliver is a consistent developer experience that doesn’t block users from using modern DevOps practices, such as CI/CD powered by either VSTS or TFS products.
Today at Build 2018, we’ve announced that:
- We’re enabling customers to register and connect to an Azure Stack subscriptions right from VSTS Release Management (RM) capabilities, which previously only worked with Azure cloud environment
- Enabled this same feature for those customers who want to use Team Foundation Server (TFS), by including it as part of TFS 2018 Update 2 release
This week at Build 2018 Azure Stack had many announcements, you can read through all of them in their blog post.
For more information on how you can connect to your Azure Stack infrastructure or hybrid setup from VSTS RM see our documentation:
Team Foundation Server 2018 Update 2 (GA), is now available
For those that don’t know or have not made the connection, Microsoft’s on-premises DevOps server product called Team Foundation Server (TFS) has been available for many years, and has become our cloud-hosted DevOps service called Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). So two names, but really one product with flexibility on how you deploy it for your organization.
While VSTS ships every three weeks to production with new features and bug fixes, for TFS we ship quarterly updates and a major version every year or so. These release package up features that we’ve already shipped to VSTS and make them available to on-premises customers.
Today at Build 2018, we’ve announced that:
- TFS 2018 Update 2 is now generally available (GA), fully supported and production ready for you to upgrade. You can begin the download directly at this link.
- This update includes improvements to over 25 feature area, including Release Gates (GA), improved Wiki search, ability to use mentions in pull requests, “not in” query operators and so much more. See the release notes for the full list.
- We’ve also listened to customer feedback and reverted a change that we made in TFS 2018 Update 1 and brought back your ability to connect your XAML controllers and run XAML builds. So while the XAML Builds feature is depreciated, we still wanted to still listen to users feedback and unblock upgrades of TFS Update 2+ for those customers that needed this feature.
For more information read the full details in our TFS 2018 Update 2 GA blog post.
VSTS Sprintly Releases — Starting deployment of Sprint 134
While you’ve now read about our major “Build 2018 announcements”, we’ve also started releasing our regular sprintly production deployment of new VSTS feature and bug fix.
If you want to learn more about why VSTS ships new features slowly using a ring-based approach, check out our previous blog post on this subject.
The current rolling release is Sprint 134 release, and its deployment started Monday (May 7th 2018) and will continue to deploy to all customer accounts over the next three weeks.
Some highlights in this release of things that will take time to reach all customers include:
For cloud-hosted Build agents
- Build Ruby apps based on a variety of Ruby versions
- Build, test, and publish Python apps based on a variety of Python versions
- Build Java apps on hosted agents with Java 10
- Leverage improved Xcode build and test output from xcpretty
For release management
For package management
- The ability to follow packages
- Control who can pull packages from upstream sources
- Change feed settings without having to manually save
Note: some of the features in this sprint (such as DevOps Project improvements, Release Gates and a few others) are already live to all customers. But most features listed in the release notes will take time to deploy safely.
For full details of what features are in this release, see our Sprint 134 release notes.
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