Microsoft's continued relevance in the age of DevOps is no accident, says CloudBees

Microsoft has made sure it's easier and cheaper easier for agile enterprises to stick with its platforms, says DevOps evangelist Brian Dawson

As a general rule, when it comes to DevOps it's a case of out with the old and in with the new. Computing's recent research found that of all the technology providers thought to be on the up, only one was a traditional enterprise brand.

It is no accident that Microsoft bucks this trend, said Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist at enterprise vendor CloudBees. Microsoft retains a significant presence on the server and on the desktop as well as with virtualisation technologies and programming languages.

"Those developing and delivering software for these environments with skills in these languages have the same need as the overall market to deliver faster," said Dawson.

"Microsoft has taken steps to address these needs in time to capitalise on the mainstreaming of continuous delivery and DevOps, and has made it more logical and economical to adopt Microsoft solutions then to replace them and retrain staff."

Dawson singled out innovations in Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS) source code management tool to provide better support for continuous integration and continuous testing as being pivotal. In addition, he said, for Agile developers "Azure is an affordable and fully-featured cloud solution with support for containers and Mesos".

These developments are representative of Microsoft's transition from trying to control everything to a proactive focus on integrating with third party platforms and products.

"You have the integrations and opening up of the platform to support open source, market leading solutions such as Jenkins, Git, SVN and Java," Dawson explained.

"There's also greater participation in the larger development and DevOps communities, such as donating Azure resources in support of the open source Jenkins project, open sharing of knowledge and technology and organising meet-ups, open source conferences and office hours."

In summary, Microsoft has been canny in both its approach and its timing, responding to the needs of its existing existing user base by adopting a more open approach, and ultimately making it easier and cheaper for firms to stick with its development solutions and platforms, even as they move to a more Agile approach based on heterogeneous technologies, rather than having to retrain or hire new developers.

Computing's DevOps Summit returns on 19 September. Attendance is free to qualifying IT leaders and other senior IT professionals, but places will go fast, so secure yours now.