Azure Devops services overview

The current post presents an Azure Devops services overview, as of late October 2022. Given the dynamic nature of public clouds, this list will most likely change soon in the near future but nevertheless acts as a general point of reference when discussing Azure devops services. You find an overview of all Azure service categories at https://stefanos.cloud/blog/azure-service-categories/.

Devops services

Azure offers the following developer tools services to allow developers and devops engineers to perform a wide range of devops tasks. Many of the services below overlap with Azure development tools services.

Azure Artifacts

Create, host, and share packages with your team

Azure Boards

Plan, track, and discuss work across your teams

Azure DevOps

Services for teams to share code, track work, and ship software

Azure Lab Services

Easily provide on-demand or scheduled access to preconfigured virtual machines to support your scenarios. Teach a class, train professionals, run a hackathon, or host a hands-on lab—simply define your needs and the service will distribute the lab in the cloud to the recipients.

Azure DevTest Labs

Quickly create environments using reusable templates and artifacts

Azure App Center

Quickly create high-quality apps for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. Automate your build, test, and distribution pipelines. And continuously monitor real-time performance. All in one place.

Azure Monitor

Full observability into your applications, infrastructure, and network

Azure Pipelines

Continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform and cloud

Azure Repos

Get unlimited, cloud-hosted private Git repos for your project

Azure Test Plans

Test and ship confidently with an exploratory test toolkit

DevOps tool integrations

Use your favorite DevOps tools with Azure

Azure Load Testing ^Preview

Optimize app performance with high-scale load testing

Azure Managed Grafana

Deploy Grafana dashboards as a fully managed Azure service

Microsoft Dev Box ^Preview

Streamline development with secure, ready-to-code workstations in the cloud

Azure Deployment Environments ^Preview

Quickly spin up app infrastructure environments with project-based templates

Becoming Azure-certified developer and devops engineer

As per the Microsoft official certification poster (https://aka.ms/TrainCertPoster), there are four available certifications in the fields of Azure developer tools services.

Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204). Candidates for the Azure Developer Associate certification are cloud developers who participate in all phases of development from requirements definition and design to development, deployment, and maintenance. They partner with cloud DBAs, cloud administrators, and clients to implement solutions. Candidates should be proficient in Azure SDKs, data storage options, data connections, APIs, app authentication and authorization, compute, and container deployment, debugging, performance tuning, and monitoring.
Microsoft Azure IoT developer (AZ-220). Candidates for this exam should have a general understanding of device types and Azure services, including data storage options, data analysis, data processing, AI, and other platform as a service (PaaS) options. They must be able to program in at least one Azure IoT software development kit–supported (SDK–supported) language.
Microsoft 365 Certified: Developer Associate. Microsoft 365 developers are proficient in Microsoft identity, Microsoft Graph, and building apps for Microsoft Teams. They have general knowledge on UI elements (including Fluent UI (Office UI Fabric), integration points (including Office Add-ins, SharePoint Framework, Actionable Messages), and determining workload platform targets.

Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400). Responsibilities for this role include designing and implementing strategies for collaboration, code, infrastructure, source control, security, compliance, continuous integration, testing, delivery, monitoring, and feedback.

The foundational certification which covers all basic aspects of software development is related to the 98-361 exam (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/98-361), which however will soon be retired in 2022. A foundational baseline on software development can be found at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/software-development-fundamentals/.