Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS, Microsoft Visual Studio Team System) is an agile development product that is an extension of the Microsoft Visual Studio architecture. Azure DevOps includes software development, collaboration, and reporting capabilities.
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Liquibase
Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Liquibase is a database change management tool that extends DevOps best practices to the database, helping teams release software faster and safer by bringing the database change process into existing CI/CD automation. According to the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite performers are 3.4 times more likely to incorporate database change management into their process than low performers. Liquibase value proposition: Liquibase speeds up the development…
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Pricing
Azure DevOps
Liquibase
Editions & Modules
Azure Artifacts
$2
per GB (first 2GB free)
Basic Plan
$6
per user per month (first 5 users free)
Azure Pipelines - Self-Hosted
$15
per extra parallel job (1 free parallel job with unlimited minutes)
Azure Pipelines - Microsoft Hosted
$40
per parallel job (1,800 minutes free with 1 free parallel job)
Azure DevOps works well when you’ve got larger delivery efforts with multiple teams and a lot of moving parts, and you need one place to plan work, track it properly, and see how everything links together. It’s especially useful when delivery and development are closely tied and you want backlog items, code and releases connected rather than spread across tools. Where it’s less of a fit is for small teams or simple pieces of work, as it can feel like more setup and process than you really need, and non-technical users often struggle with the interface. It also isn’t great if you want instant, easy programme-level views or a very visual planning experience without putting time into configuration.
Based on my experience so far on using Liquibase in my current project, I have seen that Liquibase changelogs are version control where multiple team members and developers can work together on database and deployed automatically via CI/CD Pipeline integration using github actions and it applies same changelogs to all enviroments to remain in sync and avoid any enviroment drift. Also as Liquibase stores changelog audits in DATABASECHANGELOG table it helps in tracking purposes and to easily rollback any change . Whereas in some scenarios I feel that Liquibase have some drawbacks where if complex transformation between tables is not optimized for bulk data operations which eventually degrades database performance.
Liquibase tracks changes in a metadata table contained directly in the target database, making easy administration for the DBA.
Liquibase handles many validation tests out of the box, making it easy to choose which ones you want to include, with options for writing your own if you choose. This makes it robust and flexible in terms of validation before deployment.
Liquibase provides easy integration into deployment pipelines for CI/CD. We use it with GitHub for source control and Circle CI for validation and deployment pipelines.
I did mention it has good visibility in terms of linking, but sometimes items do get lost, so if there was a better way to manage that, that would be great.
The wiki is not the prettiest thing to look at, so it could have refinements there.
I would like Liquibase to explore all errors in the changelog files compared to one at a time. We spent a lot of time troubleshooting one error at a time versus having a batch log of errors in each file.
Understanding where to get support on things. I spent a lot of time researching externally to learn what the best practices were. Although I found some of the youtube videos helpful, I would like a little more of a technical support. This may be a feature with the paid tier, however, we leveraged open source.
Seeing more examples of how others use Liquibase and their usecases will be helpful. That way we can learn from each other which may help us improve on our own deployments.
I don't think our organization will stray from using VSTS/TFS as we are now looking to upgrade to the 2012 version. Since our business is software development and we want to meet the requirements of CMMI to deliver consistent and high quality software, this SDLC management tool is here to stay. In addition, our company uses a lot of Microsoft products, such as Office 365, Asp.net, etc, and since VSTS/TFS has proved itself invaluable to our own processes and is within the Microsoft family of products, we will continue to use VSTS/TFS for a long, long time.
We are and will continue using Liquibase and it has become an integral part of our portfolio offering, any new product is by default adopting Liquibase stack.
It's a great help to get more information about new feature release and stay updated on what the dev team is working on. I like how easy it is to just login and read through the work items. Each work item has basic details: Title, Description, Assigned to, State, Area (what it belongs to), and iteration (when it’s worked on). See image above.They move through different states (New → Discovery → Ready for Prod → etc.).
When we've had issues, both Microsoft support and the user community have been very responsive. DevOps has an active developer community and frankly, you can find most of your questions already asked and answered there. Microsoft also does a better job than most software vendors I've worked with creating detailed and frequently updated documentation.
Liquibase has been responsive and even is letting our group test some new products they are developing and even made code changes to their production system because of a couple bugs we have reported. Liquibase licensing has also been easy and simple. I have nothing bad to say about any of the Liquibase staff I have talked to. They also hold free information webinars for new content that helps spread adoption and moving the product forward.
Microsoft Planner is used by project managers and IT service managers across our organization for task tracking and running their team meetings. Azure DevOps works better than Planner for software development teams but might possibly be too complex for non-software teams or more business-focused projects. We also use ServiceNow for IT service management and this tool provides better analysis and tracking of IT incidents, as Azure DevOps is more suited to development and project work for dev teams.
There is no real competitor when it comes to what Liquibase does - at least not at the time we considered it three years ago. It was an easy choice in this regard, but we could have said no to it if it made our workload more difficult. But our proof of concept showed there were easy wins to be had by implementing its software.
We have saved a ton of time not calculating metrics by hand.
We no longer spend time writing out cards during planning, it goes straight to the board.
We no longer track separate documents to track overall department goals. We were able to create customized icons at the department level that lets us track each team's progress against our dept goals.
