{"id":3171,"date":"2012-06-14T14:55:36","date_gmt":"2012-06-14T14:55:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/bharry\/2012\/06\/14\/spring-is-over\/"},"modified":"2024-05-02T14:39:40","modified_gmt":"2024-05-02T21:39:40","slug":"spring-is-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/spring-is-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Spring is over"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, so maybe I didn\u2019t need to tell you that.\u00a0 Or maybe, you observe that it isn\u2019t quite true because summer officially starts in about a week.\u00a0 But then that\u2019s not really what I mean.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written little tidbits about our transition from an organization shipping a box product every couple of years to one still shipping a box product but also shipping a cloud service every 3 weeks.\u00a0 There have been changes to virtually every aspect of how we work.\u00a0 One of those aspects is planning.<\/p>\n

For our cloud cadence work, we have moved to a 6 month planning cycle.\u00a0 We roughly draw out our vision in 6 month phases.\u00a0 We still maintain a priority ordered backlog and pull things off in 3 week increments but the 6 month cycle provides some overall direction that we use to help prioritize our backlogs and decide what order we are doing things in.\u00a0 One 6 month period is Jan 1st \u2013 June 30th (called \u201cSpring\u201d) and the other is July 1st \u2013 December 31st (called \u201cFall\u201d).\u00a0 I guess we only have 2 seasons \u2013 but hey, if you\u2019ve got to pick two seasons in my neck of the woods, those are two good ones to pick \"Image<\/a><\/p>\n

So, Spring is over.<\/p>\n

Round about 6 months ago, we set out a vision for this Spring and it was briefly summarized as \u201cGo Big!\u201d.\u00a0 It entailed a series of investments that would ultimately culminate in the announcements we\u2019ve made in the past couple of weeks \u2013 The TFS\/Azure continuous deployment scenario<\/a> which enables a smooth workflow for agile teams building Azure apps and the opening up of the Team Foundation Service<\/a> to anyone and everyone who wants to use it.\u00a0 There were many investments along the way that ultimately enabled these end results, including:<\/p>\n

A build service<\/strong> \u2013 The build service<\/a>, in and of itself, is a darned useful thing.\u00a0 However, it was all part of the plan to deliver Azure continuous deployment.\u00a0 This is a good example of building larger scenarios in smaller chunks and releasing them independently while ultimately working towards an ultimate goal.<\/p>\n

The new \u201cwelcome\u201d experience<\/strong> \u2013 The new landing experience<\/a> was an important part of providing an easy way for the larger group of people we knew would come visit the service to find out what the heck this service is and how to use it effectively.<\/p>\n

Licensing changes<\/strong> \u2013 Making Team Explorer Everywhere more accessible<\/a> and easier to use with Team Foundation Service.<\/p>\n

Multi-tenancy<\/strong> \u2013 To handle the much larger volume of users and accounts, we had to make some significant changes to ensure we could operate the service cost effectively enough.\u00a0 The biggest of these was multi-tenancy that allows us to share costs (though, not data) among multiple tenants.\u00a0 This cut our costs by more than a factor of 20.<\/p>\n

Improved performance and scale<\/strong> \u2013 In addition to managing the costs, we did a bunch of work to ensure the system scaled, performed well and was robust under heavy load.\u00a0 The gradual growth of the service afforded by the invitation code mechanism was a great way for us to manage this carefully.<\/p>\n

Cloud mechanics<\/strong> \u2013 We built lots of underlying capabilities, like Feature switches, that enable cloud deployment models.\u00a0 Feature switches, for instance, allow us to deploy new capabilities to the service but selectively turn them on so we can effectively \u201cbeta test\u201d them on the live service.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been a busy and productive 6 months.\u00a0 We\u2019ve learned a lot and shipped a bunch of great new features.\u00a0 Of course, all of this happened while simultaneously delivering the Team Foundation Server 2012 product (Release Candidate is now available<\/a>).\u00a0 Pretty much everything we wanted to do for Spring is done and we are now framing the Fall release wave.\u00a0 As with Spring, you\u2019ll continue to see a steady stream of new improvement every 3 weeks that will ultimately build into an experience we want to deliver by December.\u00a0 It\u2019s been a fun way to approach things.<\/p>\n

Looking forward to a great Fall!<\/p>\n

Brian<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, so maybe I didn\u2019t need to tell you that.\u00a0 Or maybe, you observe that it isn\u2019t quite true because summer officially starts in about a week.\u00a0 But then that\u2019s not really what I mean. I\u2019ve written little tidbits about our transition from an organization shipping a box product every couple of years to one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":244,"featured_media":14617,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[5],"class_list":["post-3171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-tfs"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

OK, so maybe I didn\u2019t need to tell you that.\u00a0 Or maybe, you observe that it isn\u2019t quite true because summer officially starts in about a week.\u00a0 But then that\u2019s not really what I mean. I\u2019ve written little tidbits about our transition from an organization shipping a box product every couple of years to one […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/244"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3171"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3171\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14617"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/bharry\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}