Go Big, Go Blue

ATG isn't a small company anymore. ZenHub was a good idea, but it didn't scale as far as we had hoped, and Phab wikis are deprecated. AWS identities are confusing and we're already reaching scale limits on accounts, roles, and cross-connects. Google drive is great for storing and collaborating on documents, but discovery is nigh-on impossible. Yet work must continue. We still need to plan and execute. We need to track defects. We need to build and store artifacts at scale. We need monitoring, alerting, analytics, and dashboards. We need to share documentation. We need to meet all of those needs (and more) with an integrated solution that extends our current usage of GitHub.

Therefore, we're moving to Azure DevOps. With Azure we start with the source control system we're already using and then extend it with compute, storage, identity management, work item tracking, document management, analytics, communications, and a CI/CD system designed and built, from the ground up, for the enterprise customer.

Regardless of what you think of the quality of the OS, the Azure DevOps system scales to 10s of thousands of users working on multi-million line codebases like Windows and Office 365 with distributed build and test systems that can scale up and down as needed to meet demand. Work item tracking that lets you search the entire corpus of items, but let you build complex queries, handle fan-out/fan-in dependencies, bulk item entry/update either online or offline.

Identity management that scales to include not just every user, but every computer, desktop and DC, integrates location and status with email, voice/video chat, and fine grained access control. Identity management that manages not only email, documents, and chat, but also includes every process running on any node, desktop to service, service to service, and on-behalf-of authentication (batch API for example).

Best in class document editing capabilities. Online and offline editing with full markup and review capabilities. Cross-linked pivot tables that pull directly from source of truth databases. Project plans that include resource availability, Gantt charts, critical path analysis, and full programmatic access and linking so they're always up to date with respect to work item tracking.

Time series databases? SQL databases? NoSQL databases? Integrated queries? Analytics? Dashboarding? Alerting? All part of the system.

Migration began this morning and should be done by EOD. Enjoy.