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)
VMware AppDefense (discontinued)
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
VMware AppDefense was a hypervisor-native workload protection platform for enterprise virtualization and security teams, used to deliver a secure virtual infrastructure and simplify micro-segmentation planning by providing application visibility, reputation scoring, and security. The product is discontinued, and no longer available.
N/A
Pricing
Azure DevOps
VMware AppDefense (discontinued)
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.
Being a VMware product, AppDefense has the advantage of compatibility with all of the VMware product feature updates and patches ( ESXi, NSX, vCenter, etc.). Paired with Carbon Black, it's resource overhead is well-tuned compared to traditional antivirus products.
I think that the AppDefense approach is clever and sets it apart from other products. Having a baseline of normal behavior that I can see is something I haven't seen in another product before.
AppDefense doesn't overload my systems with performance draining agents.
AppDefense integrates with VMWare products I have or plan to purchase.
Access to AppDefense support has been better than any other VMWare products.
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 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.
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.
The product is still quite new, and there seems to be a lack of technical information available for both the E.U. and support staff. That being said, the support staff that I have worked with have always been very knowledgeable and ensure that they see a ticket through to completion.
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.
We have several security applications, but none exactly like VMware AppDefense. That is one of the reasons I like it, as it seems to take a different angle on monitoring and protection. The other apps monitor different things, but one thing AppDefense seems to have over them is a streamlined interface and not a lot of false positives.
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.
As with everything now, automation is key. AppDefense effectively monitors the activity on all our VMs, freeing administrators to work on more projects
Makes it much easier to diagnose issues when system are not running as intended
