DevOps platforms have demonstrated immense importance in accelerating software delivery and fostering collaboration between development and operations teams. In the fast-paced landscape of software development, the culture of DevOps has been widely recognized and adopted as it unites people, processes, and technologies. The joint solution of GitHub and Azure, combined with the power of Visual Studio, can create order for previously staggered workflows and delayed deployments.

Microsoft has been recognized as a Leader by Gartner® and placed furthest for Completeness of Vision on the Magic Quadrant™ for DevOps platforms. Combined as a single DevOps solution, GitHub and Azure DevOps can address dev productivity challenges like slow coding, compromised quality, and mundane, repeatable tasks.

Microsoft is committed to accelerating developer productivity with its full developer stack

Microsoft offers an additional cloud development environment aside from GitHub Codespaces. Microsoft Dev Box gives developers self-service access to secure, high-performance workstations in the cloud that are preconfigured and ready-to-code for their projects. Dev Box enables developer teams to tailor their workstation to their projects with compute options to support even the most demanding workloads and integrations with tools like Visual Studio to deliver a seamless developer experience.

When an organization adopts GitHub and Azure DevOps, it encompasses more than just a set of tools that work well together. GitHub Enterprise is an enterprise-ready software development platform designed for the complex workflows of modern development. It’s no wonder it’s adopted by 90% of the Fortune 100. Azure DevOps supports a collaborative culture and set of processes that bring together developers, project managers, and contributors to create software. Together, development teams can seamlessly use their GitHub repositories with integrations with a variety of Azure DevOps services.

Organizations can also easily integrate Visual Studio, the most widely used integrated development environment (IDE) on the market, for an even more productive workflow and seamless build.

When procured jointly under one license, your team will experience:

• Smarter collaboration:
  • GitHub and Azure DevOps facilitate smarter collaboration among teams by integrating features such as code reviews embedded in every pull request, timeline-style interfaces, integrated issue tracking, and project boards. This fosters a dynamic environment where teams seamlessly collaborate, ensuring a unified and efficient workflow.
• Streamlined security:
  • GitHub Enterprise empowers organizations to enforce robust security policies without burdening existing processes. Integration with the organization’s authentication systems and centralized permission management ensures a secure development ecosystem. With GitHub Advanced Security (GHAS), vulnerabilities are identified and rectified proactively, preventing them from reaching production. Plus, GHAS notifies teams if secrets are exposed in the codebase, enhancing the overall security posture.
• Simpler administration:
  • GitHub Enterprise offers versatility in deployment options. Whether on in-house servers or private/public cloud infrastructure, the platform provides multiple deployment pathways. This flexibility is complemented by advanced monitoring tools and activity dashboards, offering full visibility into projects and teams. Simpler administration becomes a reality, allowing organizations to manage their development environment with ease and efficiency.
• Increased scalability:
  • GitHub Enterprise is engineered with workflow and administration features tailored for scalability to support organizations in their growth. High availability and load balancing features ensure that the platform seamlessly scales alongside your organization’s expanding needs. As the demands increase, GitHub Enterprise easily offers a scalable foundation for success.

What’s next for engineering and development teams

A more recent evolution from DevOps principles is platform engineering. This new approach helps scale DevOps efforts across teams by standardizing development toolsets used across the organization and providing developers with self-service, on-demand access to deploy the resources they need via a secure, centrally managed platform. Platform engineering empowers developers to achieve scale by eliminating toil and reducing cognitive load while making it easier for admins to meet broader operational and organizational standards.

Many organizations have already adopted this mindset and have implemented their own internal platform engineering teams. In fact, Gartner projects that “By 2026, 80% of large software engineering organizations will establish platform engineering teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.”

Teams can leverage building blocks from Microsoft and its myriad of tools to create their own personalized, optimized, and secure developer experiences.

Microsoft also leads AI innovation with the most widely adopted AI developer tool—GitHub Copilot. GitHub Copilot now works within Visual Studio, enabling developers to stay in their workflow and complete tasks faster with the help of multi-line suggestions prompted by existing code and code comments. Building new functionality, writing unit tests, and learning new technologies has never been easier, streamlining the software development lifecycle (SDLC) like never before. The most recent feature added to this tool is Copilot Chat, enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet.

With each of these platforms—DevOps and platform engineering—and continued innovation in AI through Copilot and Copilot Chat, Microsoft is helping guide development teams to success and foster a culture of continuous improvement and streamlined, satisfying developer experiences. Leveraging the Microsoft portfolio for DevOps workflows and platforms, organizations experience seamless, secure, yet flexible solutions to build next-gen applications where they want, when they want.

As organizations continue to navigate the dynamic landscape of DevOps and platform engineering, Microsoft will remain at the forefront, year over year. To unlock the full potential, download the report and learn more about the power of Microsoft DevOps solutions.

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Gartner, Magic Quadrant for DevOps Platforms, Manjunath Bhat, Thomas Murphy, and 6 more, 5 June 2023.

Smarter With Gartner, “What Is Platform Engineering?,” October 26, 2023.

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