DevOps is still one of the most important buzzwords within the IT sector. As such, it is a composite of development and business operations. Mathias Van De Pol is a Cloud Native Architect at Arxus, helping customers put their applications on Microsoft Azure in the best way possible. Today he shows us the way in the world of DevOps and GitHub.
DevOps is a collection of people, processes, and technology with the goal of providing continuous value to customers. By switching to a DevOps culture, your team can better meet the needs of your customers, increase trust in built applications and reach your goal faster. To let your employees get used to the new DevOps way of working, it is best to start in the planning phase.
At this stage, you have to make a choice right away. There are several vendors of DevOps, but the best known are with Microsoft: Azure DevOps Suite and GitHub. To make a choice between the two, it's best to take a look at your company's current set-up. If you are already using tools from Azure DevOps, then it may be difficult to switch to GitHub. You will have to start working hybrid via GitHub Capabilities.
Are you a starter? Then it's best to already take into account now the tools you'll need in the future. For you, GitHub may be a good choice. GitHub has become well-known in the open source community and is currently very popular with start-ups. It's an ideal tool if you want to build something quickly, and small businesses often find everything they need there. It's also the potential that caused Microsoft to acquire the company.
Azure DevOps Suite has been around at Microsoft for a long time and has benefits mainly in the plan section. Thanks to their stories, features and the ability to define epics, you get more out of the Suite. It also offers more specific capabilities to enterprise customers.
GitHub is still in its infancy in some areas compared to Azure Devops, but is catching up quickly. This is partly due to the efforts of Microsoft, which releases new updates every week. For example, if there is an issue with your code, GitHub Issues allows you to create, schedule and track an issue so you can fix it. While there isn't a comprehensive set of tools yet, it's clear that work is underway.
Via the recent addition of code spaces, a developer can, for example, quickly and easily set up a development environment without needing a powerful machine. This is because it is in Microsoft's cloud. On the other hand, it also has a whole visual studio code online which is a powerful tool to quickly make some code changes.
After the planning phase, of course, you also have the whole delivery part if you want to deploy your code. It has to end up somewhere. At GitHub, you have GitHub Actions. That's fairly recent, because you used to need alternative tools. You notice that Microsoft wants to invest more in this, but you cannot compare it with Azure DevOps yet. There you see that it is more mature and more extensive. There are more possibilities in certain rulesets or gateways, and you can build in more control.
So if you have to choose between Azure DevOps and GitHub, you're faced with a difficult choice. If you as a company are in doubt as to which one suits you best, we would be happy to help you with that.