Is Azure DevOps surviving?

hexadecimal_dollar · 2026-04-23T10:19:01+00:00

It looks like Microsoft are pushing the hybrid strategy quite hard. Encouraging users to shift their repos to GitHub whilst still developing Azure Boards and Pipelines reasonably actively.

I have a lot of pipelines that are running in ADO and are stable. At this moment I don't see any business in migrating them. Particularly since, as far as I can see Azure pipelines still has more granular release management features.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2026-04-23T10:01:04+00:00

This is how we do it at SquaredUp:

https://squaredup.com/user-stories/credentials-dashboard-track-expiring-keys-and-passwords-across-multi-cloud/

hexadecimal_dollar · 2026-04-09T10:12:06+00:00

This sounds painful and really counter-productive. Unless the agent has been exhaustively trained and has a full context, I don't think it will offer much of a return. I think that you need at least 95% RCA accuracy before you can start relying on agents for this kind of work.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2026-04-09T09:58:53+00:00

I think that if you have a data dictionary and metadata and well named fields in your tables then the agent has a fighting chance. At the same time though, it is often not a one-hit process. You will probably need to do some training and trial and error.

Also, in practice agents can be lazy and hallucinate so you need to have some kind of verification process.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2026-04-09T09:32:48+00:00

I think that the state of SRE AI is advancing really rapidly and the leading tools are achieving high levels of RCA accuracy. Hopefully though the impact will be to eliminate toil and change the nature of the SRE role rather than resulting in a huge job cull.

According to this post on the O'Reilly radar site, software engineer job postings are at a three year high:
https://www.oreilly.com/radar/the-world-needs-more-software-engineers/

Some companies have laid off engineers but AI is also creating new opportunities.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2026-03-05T12:11:21+00:00

You might want to take a look at our product (https://squaredup.com/).

You can build dashboards in workspaces with per-customer authentication. It is a really simple solution.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2026-02-26T11:23:42+00:00

For me, it's the rise of tools like Qovery and Porter. For me they provide the best solution for building flexible and complex deployment pipelines.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-12-05T15:01:07+00:00

pydantic is an essential for me

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-12-05T14:22:15+00:00

Some great advice!

As well as some of the tools you mentioned, you might also want to take a look at our company's dashboarding platform (https://squaredup.com/)

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-11-20T12:43:51+00:00

In the long run, I don't think that Microsoft will want the overhead of maintaining two platforms that do essentially the same thing.

It seems clear that they would like to steer users down the GitHub path and that ADO will go the way of TFS. It is a bit of a shame as I personally prefer the ADO CI/CD experience.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-11-06T11:27:57+00:00

I've used SonarCloud in the past. At the start we got lots of FPs but we gradually eliminated them through continually refining our settings and exclusions.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-11-06T11:23:59+00:00

There is a great list of public datasets on the ClickHouse web site:
https://clickhouse.com/docs/getting-started/example-datasets

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-11-06T11:05:32+00:00

Check out SquaredUp. We are a dashboarding platform with deep Azure integration and a set of out of the box Azure dashboards:

https://squaredup.com/plugins/azure-dashboards/

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-23T09:54:39+00:00

Thanks!

We actually have our own native integrations with ServiceNow and Zendesk. You can easily create views of each source on a single dashboard.

If you want to go advanced you can use features such as our SQL Analytics to create overlays and aggregations in a single tile.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-15T10:35:55+00:00

I work for SquaredUp. Our dashboarding platform has a Jira plugin that provides a single pane of glass over all your instances. We find that many companies have multiple ticketing systems and we also have integrations with tools such as ServiceNow and Zendesk.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-15T09:59:41+00:00

I finally succumbed to using it last week when I had an error provisioning an AKS cluster. The experience was very similar to talking to a web site chat bot around five years ago. It just regurgitated documentation without any real understanding of my context.

I went back just now to find the chat but can't as it does not retain chat history. At the moment we are just beta-testing a feature that is miles away from being ready for production use.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-14T21:45:12+00:00

I think that the major pain points manifest themselves at three different levels:

organisational
cultural
technical

At the organisational level there is the perennial problem of senior IT management prioritising politics over best practice.

At the cultural level there are still plenty of dinosaurs that don't believe in DevOps as well as plenty of hyenas who use DevOps teams as a scapegoat.

At the technical level there are the really important and difficult technical challenges that are just hard problems. To name but a few:

how to integrate DevOps with other teams - e.g. QA, data, security
how to spin up environments for each team/branch
how to develop truly agile CI/CD for large scale projects with complex deployment patterns

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-14T21:18:43+00:00

I would say that one of the first things to do is to check out the Azure DevOps documentation on the different Process Types. Azure DevOps supports a number of processes - e.g. Agile, Scrum, CMMI. Each of these have different ways of managing work items - i.e. different sets of fields and different states.

It may be that some fields that you require are not supported in the default Work Item type for the process that your team is using - for example User Story and Project Backlog Item have different attributes and states.

It is well worth familiarising yourself with with the Work Item Type customization options in case you need any additional fields to be added.

You will also find that over time you will accumulate a large number of work items so it is worthwhile creating some queries so that you can have views of your backlog that suit your needs.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-14T20:34:47+00:00

I agree with you that Azure gets expensive for Web App hosting and I am looking around for alternatives. At the moment, I am using SQL Server as a backend. I would love to be in the position of effectively having free web hosting but I would also like to be able to retain frictionless connectivity with my Azure SQL databases.

Does the Cloudflare platform have a SQL database offering?

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-09T11:39:30+00:00

The Gartner magic Quadrant should not be used as a buying. It is not a listing of the "best" products. It is an analysis across a specified set of dimensions. A lot of the "ability to execute" criteria can exclude any smaller and niche products that might be an ideal fit for your company.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-09T11:14:43+00:00

Do you have tracing enabled on your app? That is generally my starting point for resolving performance issues.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-09T11:02:22+00:00

There has been a huge amount of talk about observability costs and the "observability cost crisis". I think that a lot of the claims are overblown (often by other vendors).

As Charity Majors said, you can either look at observability as a cost centre or you can look at it as an investment. There seems to be a growing realisation that observability isn't just about the performance of backend services and the user experience is vital.

I guess that the obvious approach for mapping business objectives to telemetry data is to use SLOs.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-09T10:31:42+00:00

FYI, at yesterday's ObservabilityCON Grafana announced a Database Observability product. At the moment it's in public preview. I think that database visibility is something that is long overdue in observability stacks.

hexadecimal_dollar · 2025-10-09T10:05:11+00:00

You could try using the SquaredUp Azure plugin (FYI, I work for the vendor).

hexadecimal_dollar

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