Stack Overflow just released their annual community survey and it reminded us that a happy developer is a developer who can ship. Of course, nowadays shipping means having a great pipeline for continuous integration and continuous deployment. That allows you to continuously improve. For a long time now we’ve been working hard to make the DevOps experiences in VSTS best of breed. More recently we’ve also been trying to continuously improve content to help you learn about them.

Every week I talk to customers about their DevOps journeys. Most customers have mastered Agile and Version Control and appreciate the simpler experiences we’re bringing to them. Build Automation and Continuous Integration are much more common than they were. Most teams are starting to invest in some form of monitoring and telemetry so they can see what is really happening in production. For many teams, continuous deployment is that next step in their process maturity to help them get better at DevOps. Therefore, we thought we’d have a push to de-mystify CI/CD during April to help people “Spring Into DevOps” (or maybe that should be “Fall into DevOps” if you are in the Southern Hemisphere?). We will focus on talking about how to go from continuous integration to continuous deployment. There’ll be several blog posts coming here over the month on this theme, but there are also many special events during the month to help you Spring Into DevOps. If you are hosting your own event in your local community, then please get in touch and tweet about it using the #SpringIntoDevOps hashtag.

What is DevOps?

If you’re new to DevOps, or want to explain it to your friends and colleagues, take a look at https://www.visualstudio.com/learn/what-is-devops/. We’ve posted informational content here to help you get started on building a DevOps mindset in your organization.

Getting Started

Maybe you have decided that DevOps is the way to go and you want to take that next step with Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery, here are some links to help you get started with applications in .NET, Java, Node, iOS, Android and more:

• Build and Release – Implement continuous integration and continuous deployment to reliably deliver quality apps to your customers.
• Test – Test continuously while you code, build, and deploy before releasing to production.
• Package – Publish, discover, and install shared binary code from Team Build.
• Deploy to Azure – Release apps to Azure services and Azure virtual machines.
• HockeyApp – Distribute test releases for your mobile apps. Monitor usage and crashes.
• Application Insights – Monitor performance and usage for your live web apps.

Live Events

There will be meetups and conferences this month and we would love to see you. If you are hosting your own live event, please let us know by tweeting about it using the #SpringIntoDevOps tag. We’d love to see you live, but check back for links to the recordings if you are not able to make them in person. We’ve posted these resources and registration links on http://aka.ms/SpringIntoDevOps.

Global Azure Bootcamp

Don’t forget that April 22 is also the Global Azure Bootcamp. There will be meet-ups happening in user groups all around the world with lots of DevOps content there to get your teeth into. You can find your nearest Global Azure Bootcamp here or learn how to set up your own.

Webcasts

If you can’t make the face-to-face events, then we have a few webcasts you might want to catch. We’d love to see you live, but check back for links to the recordings if you are not able to make them in person. Visit the Spring Into DevOps site for registration links.

Podcasts

If you prefer to listen, you’ll be hearing lots of #SpringIntoDevOps content on your favorite podcasts including .NET Rocks, RunAs Radio and RadioTFS. We’ll post links to individual shows here as they are published – but if you subscribe now to the shows you’ll get the episodes as they come out along with other great content.

Build

While we’ll be talking a lot during April about #SpringIntoDevOps the fun doesn’t stop in April. We’ve loads of great features coming out soon to make it even easier for your team to Spring Into DevOps. While the Build conference is now sold out, plan on watching the videos that come out of Build for the first look and some great new DevOps experiences coming soon – we’re really looking forward to seeing what you think.

Now is the Time to Spring Into DevOps

It has never been a better time to take that next step in your DevOps maturity and make it easy to get your software into production.  Concentrate on solving your customers’ problems, not the mechanics of getting the software into their hands. You might have already got your build automated and have some basic unit tests, but how do you get that software into a test environment for stakeholder feedback? How about pushing that software into your production environment? Please take the time this April to Spring Into DevOps and think about what you and your team could do to make it easier to build and deploy your code. Let us know what we can do to help and please share your success stories using the #SpringIntoDevOps hashtag.