Moving from Jenkins and Atlassian to Azure DevOps
Disclaimer: This could be an extremely opinionated article about azure DevOps and I will be sharing my very own experience.
Some Background — In my previous organization, where I joined as a platform engineer, my team used to manage the complete cloud infrastructure for a payment gateway client
The tool stack I used included — Jira, bitbucket, Jenkins, Azure, Slack, Miro, Sprint poker, Trello, Pagerduty, and Mongo Atlas.
The tech stack — Shell, groovy, Docker, K8s, Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana, a bit of python, and a lot of Terraform.
While we automated most of the service deployment in the k8s cluster, We still had to manage user onboarding in azure manually, providing them access to the azure resources via VPN, managing Jenkins and infrastructure provisioning, and all the integrations tasks since there were many tools on-boarded to server the different purposes. For instance, Jenkins should be able to talk to bitbucket, slack, and azure. We majorly used confluence for documentation.
While all this looked like a lot of learning opportunity for me, it never really worried me why were we using multiple tools and not relying on one of the cloud providers.
Entry to Azure DevOps -
As soon as I joined the next organization where Azure DevOps was being used extensively, I was in awe of it. While it felt a bit too much but as time passed, I got comfortable with the tool. Now I find it so convenient that I have everything in one place. From my experience now here what I think of Azure Devops.
Pros —
- Agile at one place: For agile practitioners, it comes easy to have all the boards, backlog, sprint planning tools, and retrospect tools in one place. you don’t have to google poker games for conducting a sprint planning session.
- Integrations: On the DevOps end it provides a bunch of tools to integrate and that makes life easy. For instance, if I need to deploy infrastructure using terraform and I have the plugin installed it will show me all the terraform actions in the task panel.
- Secrets management: The big one for most DevOps practitioners, I believe. You can very well store all the secrets in the key vault and integrate the key vault with the Azure DevOps project. The key vault integration has to be both ways though. You will need to define the access policies granting the
getandlistaccess to the service principal being used in the service connection for the project. - Plugins availability: Server maintenance — If you have been building Jenkins pipelines, I bet your Jira will at least have a task for upgrading Jenkins and then the plugins compatible with the newer version.
- Security — Azure DevOps employs a number of security concerns with the DevOps organization allowing access to features, functions, and data. It comes with predefined roles and all you need to do is add users to it.
- Team Management: That’s my favorite part. I love managing items, people, and events
Cons -
Branch policies : I have been comfortable with the bitbucket and GitHub for so long where I can define policies for PR and branch but with azure devops it becomes messy.
Repository View:
Bitbuckt repository — we have the repo on the left side panel along with it own comimits and pull requests and and other related items.
Azure Repository view — It is messy. They have a common repo display on the left hand side panel and load the repository files. You can switch between repositories from the drop down highlighted in top bar.
If you are a fan of bitbucket or GitHub where you get the option to delete the branch as soon as you merge the PR, you are going to get disappointed a bit. It does let you leverage the option to delete the branch but you have configured a couple of more policies like
SPOF: Terrible, Right ? If azure devOps goes down your team will have a day off. however with Jenkins and bitbucket it could possibly be one of the tool and you will still have other work areas
That’s all, folks !! Let me know your thoughts in comments section.
Happy Learning, Cheers !!
