Microsoft announced a bunch of new releases today, advancing our Cloud OS vision.  You can read more on the overall announcements here but I will focus on some new/improved application lifecycle management scenarios that support our DevOps initiatives. The cloud continues to drive new demands on application development.  It enables new ways of conceiving, building and delivering great app experiences.  It does this by enabling rapid cycle times from idea –> delivery –> feedback.  In order to really realize this virtuous cycle, you need to rethink the way you do development.  Among the changes you need to consider is how your development, test and operations teams work together to deliver an experience and to cooperate to respond quickly to both problems and opportunities. Our approach to Enterprise DevOps is anchored in Visual Studio 2012 and System Center 2012.  The wave of Cloud OS announcements today integrates these with bunch of new application lifecycle management capabilities.  These include: Global Service Monitor (GSM) – A new service offering in the System Center family that allows you to monitor and measure your application from points of presence around the world.  GSM uses “Web Tests” you can develop with Visual Studio Ultimate Edition to replay scenarios against your app and measure availability and performance. Lab Management & Windows 2012 – With the System Center 2012 SP1 release today and Visual Studio 2012 Update 1, you can use Lab Management with Windows 8 hosts to streamline your flow of code from development into the test environment – removing friction from your dev process. Incident integration – With Operations Manager in System Center 2012 SP1 and TFS/VS 2012, we’ve further streamlined the workflow for managing production incidents.  An ops engineer can easily escalate an incident to the dev team for investigation and collaboration from within Ops Manager.  The dev can open the System Center diagnostic information inside the VS Intellitrace debugging experience to quickly get at the root cause. These are just a few of the capabilities we are working on to streamline the modern build, measure, learn development cycle.  This is one more installment in our continuing commitment to deliver new value regularly. Everything you need from the VS/TFS side were included in the Update 1 we shipped at the end of November.

Brian