Azure DevOps is slick, but if you're not already using it I wouldn't start now. Use GitHub Actions instead. Now that Microsoft owns GitHub, I expect them to standardize on Actions. ADO isn't officially deprecated, but I don't think it has much of a future.

What about using Azure DevOps with Gitlab for example? Not everybody is using GitHub.

@P.A.C. Delory I agreed. I heard from people working at Microsoft Azure and GitHub Enterprise that Azure DevOps is kind of “deprecated” for GitHub Actions. There is no official announcement but I we have more and more customers coming from Azure DevOps that are pushed to use GitHub Enterprise by Microsoft Sales Rep. (I am working at Qovery)

If you are using Azure DevOps keep using it, no point mixing Azure DevOps with Gitlab. Azure DevOps isn't going anywhere anytime soon, In fact, its actually getting better and is getting new features. Not at the same rate it had before GitHub purchase, but even in recent Ignite event, MS has said it is brining GitHub Security tools into Azure DevOps, so I wouldn't go a head and quickly go with statements like "I don't think it has much of a future". MS has a HUGE client base in Azure DevOps and some of the abilities will always stay there and you will not see them in GitHub and other way around. I would say MS is bad at official announcements so most of what you hear and see are assumptions or internal misalignments between MS Sales and GitHub Sales. But I know they are working and its just matter of going to the Azure DevOps public roadmap to see. I suspect we are going to see Azure DevOps v.2 at some point to make it more stable, reliable and secure like most cloud based solutions that have been up for quite a few years, you are going to eventually get to "feature complete" state where there isn't a LOT of innovation left to do, just small increments of updates.

Yeah, there's still a feature gap between ADO and GHA, so it will stick around for a while, but in the long term I still think they'll collapse ADO into GitHub. There is a customer-facing published roadmap for Azure DevOps, but AFAIK it's not publicly available, Ask your Microsoft rep to send it to you. @Arie Heinrich Definitely agree Microsoft has been bad at communication on this. You get different answers from Microsoft people depending on who you ask. Frustrating. And I don't want to make any hasty judgments, but I just can't see them maintaining two separate products that have such a big overlap in features.

Start with GitHub would be better in my opinion. We recently migrated from Azure DevOps on-prem to DevOps service, MS team told us we should consider to move to GitHub Actions since they would focus on GitHub in next a couple of years instead DevOps. (I am in Canada, situation may be different in other countries)

They told you that because they have to show sales numbers to their managers. It was one expensive buyout, but MS didn't do it for the CICD part. They mainly did it for Co-Pilot and the future of sw development and future revenue.

@Arie Heinrich that's very possible, sales always talk 😄

One thing that I keep running into is that there are so many platforms now for managing Azure resources that they can't keep them all working - Sometimes you can do things in Powershell that don't work yet in the CLI, or things that only work reliably in the REST API, but not in Python. Now there's bicep, and the terraform providers seem rather disconnected from that, seemingly identical, development effort - why is it so hard to just pick a couple of things that work well and put all our efforts around that approach?

Its because different companies push for them. Everyone has an interest and at the end its an economic decision. But at the bottom line, if you stick to standards then the tool is irrelevant. REST API is at the core, and thus as long as you use it, and make sure to update, than no matter what layer of abstraction you place above it, it will still work. Bicep is only for Azure and its MS way to calm its heavy customers that hate ARM and dont want to put money and effort into moving to Terraform. Terraform provider will always be 'disconnected' as you rely on a provider to be updates with all latest API changes. Bicep talks directly to the ARM API layer, which is also why it doesn't require a stat. What you can do is dive into AzAPI Terraform module to compensate if you REALLY need all the preview abilities and services and cant wait. And this isn't going to change as i don't see any cloud vendor sitting with its competitors to create a unified cloud schema / definition. its actually the opposite. You can see it now and more in the near future. More and more systems will create this layer of abstraction on top, to make it easier to manage at scale but it will always be with some "delay" because of the lack of standardization between cloud vendors. At least Pulumi allows you to use different programming languages, that forced HashiCorp to come up with CDK. But both are just layers of abstractions.

Yep. TOSCA is (was?) an attempt at a unified industry standard for cloud orchestration and topology. But although it had some success, it never became a universal standard. Same old story. We solve every problem in computing with another layer of abstraction that has a DSL. But some people don't like the DSL, or it isn't ideal for what they need to do, or they just have NIH syndrome and want to roll their own. Coordination industry-wide is always a hard problem.