Azure Pipelines

The community is probably the biggest selling point here. There are so many people willing to step in and help if you ever hit a dead-end trying to implement steps in any given flow. The almost overwhelming amount of integrations available is another big win for Pipelines. It's hard to find a product that doesn't have some sort of task to support it. There are also a lot of built-in features that make working with managed identities and Defender for Cloud a breeze, so pipelines can be very secure.

It handles the scheduling and reporting part very well, especially for my api jobs. Once the job is actually set up, the way it integrates with the rest of the Azure DevOps suite is a huge plus. I can see exactly when a test run was triggered and the dashboard gives a very clean view of the pass/fail rates which is much nicer than what I am used to in other tools. The best part for me as a tester is the way it manages artifacts. After a test run, it is so easy to find the logs and test results attached right there to the build. Even though the agent setup was a pain, the actual execution once it is running feels very stable and robust.

We love that we can integrate directly using Azure deployments where we can target different types. One of the other feature we like is the version control in case our YAML file is broken or we did something bad we can go back to the previous version. Even we can track what line we type a mistake. At at last we like the community if we need help a lot of documentations for different categories of problem we can find our solution.

Microsoft doesn't seem to give much weight to the community's voices. The length of time suggestions and feature requests sit unanswered can be disheartening. They are also very opinionated on the way certain things should be handled, such as naming conventions for CI. At times you may find yourself trying to create dodgy solutions to get around this. The lack of separation between CI and CD in YAML can make project management more difficult.

Trying to get my remote client machine to talk to the pipeline securely felt like I was fighting the platform every step of the way. The error messages are so vague that I had to spend hours digging through the logs just to find out if it was a simple PAT permission or a firewall rule that wasn't even mentioned in the main guides. It feels like you need to be a security expert just to run a basic API job on your own hardware.

Nothing negative. This is good product if you run your first project. Only one thing is there no easy way to export the connection string that you set up in your project to an other project?