Azure DevOps Roadmap update for 2020 Q2

Sidi Merzouk

We have recently updated the Features Timeline to showcase areas where we are making key investments for this quarter. I am delighted to share few of those initiatives that we have planned for Q2 with you. Note that each feature links to our public roadmap project where you can find more details about each item and see its status.

General

  • Service tag

    A Service Tag represents a group of IP prefixes to help minimize complexity for security rule creation. For scenarios connecting from the Azure DevOps Services outbound to the customer’s on-prem, customers can now easily manage IP whitelisting by using the Azure Service Tag. Some of the scenarios are 1) Azure DevOps Services to connect to endpoints for Service Hooks use cases. 2) For data import, Azure DevOps Services to connect to SQL server in customer’s on-prem. 3) For kicking off a build, Azure DevOps Services to connect to a pool of customer’s agents on-prem. Service Tag for Microsoft Hosted Agents for Pipelines are not supported.

Azure Boards

  • Add state transition restriction rules to the inherited process model

    This feature will be delivered in two phases. The first phase is targeted for the end of Q2. It enables Process Administrators to restrict the transition from one state to another on a work item type. The second phase is targeted for Q3. It enables Process Administrators to restrict or allow state transitions by the users group membership.

  • Filtering by Parent Work Item on Task Board

    To help bring better consistency between the Kanban Board and Task board, we are adding a new Parent Work Item filter to the Task board. This will allow teams to filter the list of User Stories (or any work item type in the requirements category) that belong to a specific parent(s).

  • Policy to restrict Invitations from Project and Team Administrators

    Organization admins can configure a policy to allow or restrict project and team administrators from being able to invite net-new users to the organization.

  • Alternate credential usage events now supported in the audit log

    New events are now added to the audit log to track the usage of alternate credentials like personal access tokens (PAT), SSH keys as well as token lifecycle management activities like create, renew, delete and revoke PAT tokens and SSH keys.

Azure Pipelines

  • Elastic self-hosted agent pools

    We have been planning to offer elastic self-hosted agents for quite some time now. These are self-hosted agents that run on a VM scale set in your Azure subscription but their capacity is managed by Azure Pipelines. During the last quarter, we rolled out a private preview of this feature. Our private preview period is now closed. During this quarter, we will enter a public preview. All Azure DevOps organizations should be able to try this feature by May. If you are interested in learning more about how this feature works, see Scale set agents.

  • Secure YAML pipelines

    Over the past two quarters, we delivered a number of improvements in YAML pipelines aimed at making your pipelines secure. Working with a number of our top customers, we developed techniques that help central teams in your organization develop and enforce best practices while giving enough flexibility to your individual development teams. These techniques revolve around two fundamental concepts – templates and checks. We encourage you to look at our documentation to understand how you can secure your YAML pipelines. During the upcoming quarter, we will continue to enhance these features by adding more built-in checks. We will also make job access tokens more secure by limiting their access to only those repositories that are explicitly declared as resources in a pipeline.

  • Multi-repo triggers

    You can now checkout source code from multiple repositories in your YAML pipeline. However, you cannot cause your pipeline to be automatically triggered based on changes to any of those repositories. We will plug this gap this quarter. This will allow you to define a single pipeline for your micro-services that are managed in multiple repositories, or to separate your pipeline YAML file into a different repository altogether.

  • GA of multi-stage pipelines

    The new multi-stage pipelines experience has been in preview for several months now. We have been making a number of improvements in that experience based on your feedback. Our focus has been on addressing gaps and blockers. One of the drivers for this experience has been to make it mobile-friendly and, for that reason, we had to get rid of the explorer-style navigation. We understand that this increases the number of clicks to navigate from one pipeline to another. However, for the sake of mobile-friendliness and consistency, we will be moving forward and making this experience generally available at the beginning of Q2. This will also be the experience in the next version of Azure DevOps Server.

We always appreciate your feedback, because it helps us prioritize what we should work on. If you have a new idea, change you’d like to see, or a suggestion on what you’d like to see next, here are some options:

23 comments

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  • Pascal Berger 0

    Is the Current features list no longer maintained at the Azure DevOps Feature Timeline page? The last two updates are missing and for the most recent update in the server column N/A is mentioned, also for features which would apply for Azure DevOps Server (previously it mentioned Future if version was not clear yet). What does this mean for Azure DevOps Server On-Prem?

    • Pierre Letter 0

      Having features for the Azure DevOps Server 2020 Release announced for this summer would indeed be nice 🙂

    • Andre Wanlin 0

      Yes, please what is the timeline for Azure DevOps Server on-prem? It’s getting very far from the cloud version, every time I look at the REST API docs and forget to change the version I see all these great endpoints I could use but can’t because we are on-prem. There has to be 10 months worth of features that are not in the on-prem version currently

      • Wil Wilder Apaza Bustamante 0

        this comment has been deleted.

    • Sidi MerzoukMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi there,

      I went ahead and updated current features timeline to reflect the last two sprints. As for the N/A I believe that it will be renamed to TBD (to be determined) since some of these features will come to Azure DevOps Server 2020.

      • Wil Wilder Apaza Bustamante 0

        this comment has been deleted.

        • Wil Wilder Apaza Bustamante 0

          this comment has been deleted.

      • Software Developer 0

        I am %100 percent in alignment with what Andre Wanlin is saying above, the Azure DevOps Server offering is looking more and more like a dead end that Microsoft might eventually drop or deprecate. I hate to say it but the communication, openness and language is rather non-existent and almost bothering on hush-hush.

        Genuinely asking on behalf of my organization and other users, can we possibly get a clearer message regarding Azure DevOps Server? 2020 on the current features timeline is not all that helpful, December 31st 2020 is still technically “2020”.

      • M . 0

        Hi there,
        I too would like to echo the concern RE the on-prem offering.
        Is anyone actively working on it ?
        Why do people not mention it ?
        What release schedule for updates will Microsoft commit to?

        It’s a shame that so many of these amazing features won’t be used by a lot of people who don’t have a cloud option at present.

      • Pascal Berger 0

        Thanks for updating the timeline! I think in the past Future was used if it was not clear in which on-prem version a specific feature will be delivered (there are still quite a few entries marked as Future from between October 2019 and February 2020).

    • Sidi MerzoukMicrosoft employee 0

      We are actively working on the Azure DevOps Server 2020 that will ship late summer/early fall. The upcoming version will have features that you can check in our Azure DevOps docs.

      • Andre Wanlin 0

        This just made my day! :champagne emoji:

        Thanks Sidi!

      • Software Developer 0

        Thank you, Sincerely. I’m looking forward to the release and here’s hoping there aren’t any delays.

  • Leonardo Ferreira da Silva 0

    Hi there,

    We had a lot of improvements in Microsoft Build today, integrating GitHub with Codespaces, Static Web Apps and others. Will these features be also available for Azure DevOps?

    • Sidi MerzoukMicrosoft employee 0

      Some of these features are GitHub specific, but we have great integration between the two services and you can take advantage of that.

  • Armando Guimaraes 0

    Hi there…

    Complementing Leonardo Ferreira’s question….
    Will Azure Repos be replaced by github?

    • Sidi MerzoukMicrosoft employee 0

      Azure Repos will remain separate from GitHub.

  • James 0

    This “Elastic self-hosted agent pools” thing sounds very interesting! Is there any chance of a “Elastic Microsoft-hosted agent pools”?
    The current model of basically having to reserve hosts, with no burstability seems very “uncloud”.

    • Vijay MachirajuMicrosoft employee 0

      Thanks for the feedback James. There are no current plans to change the licensing model of hosted agent pools. I believe going to a per-minute model or something equivalent is what you are referring to.

  • Ankur Garg 0

    None of the hyperlinks about features in article opening – giving access denied. Taking to vsts page for some specific organization. Please make it publically accessible, if I understand it right, else no point of putting whole roadmap article.

    Eg https://dev.azure.com/mseng/AzureDevOpsRoadmap/_workitems/edit/1710676

    • Sidi MerzoukMicrosoft employee 0

      Hi Ankur, Sorry to hear that! I just tried opening the link on a private window and it worked for me. Please let us know if the problem persists.

      • Andrew Stanton 0

        @Sidi, Try opening that link in a browser that is not already signed into your MSFT account.

  • Certs Master 0

    Each feature is linked to the public roadmap project where you can learn more about a particular item. These features and dates are the current plans at this time and are subject to change. The “Timeframe” column reflects when the feature will be available on Azure DevOps Services, the “Area” column reflects the area of the product the feature aligns with most, and the “Server” column reflects when it will be available in Azure DevOps Server on-premises, if applicable.
    https://www.crack4sure.com/AZ-400-dumps.html

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