Empowering developer velocity with the most complete toolchain
Today every company is a software company. Across all industries from retail to healthcare to financial services and more, software is at the heart of every company’s strategy. According to a recent study by ISACA, 91 percent of business leaders saw digital transformation as a way of sparking innovation and finding efficiencies for their organizations.
A key catalyst for digital transformation is developers. Developers are the builders of our era, creating the ideas and writing the code that enables digital transformation for organizations around the world. To become a digital company, every company must build a culture that empowers developers to achieve more.
Organizations that successfully empower developers realize developer velocity, enabling developers to create more, innovate more, and solve more problems. Developer velocity is not just about speed, but about unleashing developer ingenuity, turning developers’ ideas into software with speed and agility to support the needs of your customers and the business.
Developer velocity means enabling developers to:
- Build productively
- Collaborate globally and securely
- Scale innovation
Microsoft is committed to delivering solutions designed for developers and development teams to support your digital transformation journey in each of these areas, so you can innovate with purpose.
Build productively
Microsoft’s developer DNA is expressed through our tools, enabling developers to be more productive without changing the way you work while exposing you to technologies, such as Kubernetes, AI, and DevOps, along the way. With support for every language and framework, developers can build on your terms, and deploy where you want.
Our mission with Visual Studio is to provide tools for every developer and today, according to a recent survey from Stack Overflow, Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio are the most popular development environments and tools used across the developer ecosystem. But we’re not stopping here. We know from talking with developers every day that software development is a constantly evolving craft. The way developers work is changing and we’re investing in tools that reflect modern workflows and practices.
For example, IntelliCode uses AI to bring the knowledge of the open source community into your code editor as you type. IntelliCode can suggest completions for whole lines of code. It can help simplify repetitive and tedious tasks like code refactoring. It can even help propagate best practices across your whole development team.
One of the biggest pain points in the developer’s job is to set up a new dev box. Whether you’re onboarding to a new team, starting a new project, or switching between tasks across different codebases, developers can spend hours setting up development environments. To help developers focus on what matters, today we’re announcing the preview of Visual Studio Online, which leverages the power of the cloud to make it easy to create and share dedicated development environments on-demand. You can create a pre-configured, isolated environment for each project, each repo, each task—in minutes. It doesn’t use any local resources and is accessible from any device. Visual Studio Online is now available for Visual Studio Code in preview and Visual Studio in preview. To learn more and sign up for the preview, view the announcement blog post.
Collaborate globally and securely
Software development is a team sport, and collaboration with peers and knowledge sharing within the team is fundamental. And, the increased pressure to continuously innovate challenges teams to move with more agility to redefine software delivery processes and to breakdown silos between development and operations.
At Microsoft, we know these challenges well as we too had to transform. We understand that the adoption of DevOps is an ongoing journey that requires a culture change and that change can be hard. As our customers walk a similar path, we want to help you realize the benefits we have seen from this transformation. We’re excited to share our experiences and learnings through the DevOps journey stories of Microsoft teams who have changed the way they work and have enabled this transformation with the support of technology.
We also know that developers solve problems with the support of the community both within and outside of your organizational boundaries. Last year, Microsoft completed the acquisition of GitHub, the home of open source and the largest developer communities on the planet, with over 40 million developers. GitHub transformed collaboration with a git hosted solution focused on community, creating the home where developers come together and work together.
Open source has also become instrumental in accelerating innovation. According to a recent report by Synopsys, 99 percent of codebases with over 1,000 files contain open source components. While this enables developers to innovate with speed, this also introduces new responsibilities like how to create and consume open source in a secure and trusted way. With GitHub, developers have tools, best practices, and infrastructure to help make software development secure. For example, developers get automatic security fixes for dependencies in your projects. GitHub’s recent acquisition of Semmle, a semantic code analysis engine, allows developers to detect vulnerabilities as part of your developer workflows to prevent vulnerabilities before they are ever released.
Finally, Microsoft is building integrations to GitHub making the developer experience seamless. Visual Studio Code’s integration with GitHub pull requests makes it easy to review source code inside the editor, where it was written. Developers can connect your GitHub repositories to Azure Boards to use kanban boards, backlogs, and dashboards for flexible work tracking. We’ve built upon GitHub Actions with GitHub Actions for Azure to make it easy to deploy to Azure environments such as Azure App Service and Azure Kubernetes Service.
Scale your innovation
Sparking innovation to enhance customer experiences and line-of-business applications is top of mind for every business leader. Whether your company is building web, mobile, IoT, or mixed reality experiences, innovation is key to the future success of your organization.
Microsoft Azure offers over 100 services that help your organization drive and scale innovation to achieve your business outcomes. Developers have the freedom to create and run applications on a massive, global network using your preferred tools and frameworks. More and more, our customers are turning to Azure serverless technologies to build cloud-native applications designed to respond quickly to market signals, reduce costs, and move faster throughout the development cycle. Direct.One, Maersk, and Shell rely on Azure serverless and fully managed services to delight customers every day. Today, more than two million applications run on the Azure serverless platform.
Today, we’re announcing the general availability of serverless capabilities to better serve the needs of our customers. With PowerShell support for Azure Functions, operations teams can now set up serverless automation processes and take advantage of the event-driven programming model for infrastructure management and scripting tasks across Azure and hybrid environments. To make serverless a real design choice for the most demanding and mission-critical applications, the Azure Function Premium plan makes cold start a thing of the past. It allows for more powerful hardware, increased control on the minimum and maximum number of instances for more predictable costs, and the ability of pre-warming resources for optimal performance.
Containers and Kubernetes are central to cloud-native application patterns. Forrester recently recognized Azure as a leader for enterprise container platforms, offering the strongest developer experience and global reach. To further support the development of mission-critical workloads with strenuous requirements around reliability and scalability, today we’re announcing the general availability of Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) support for availability zones, cluster-level autoscaling, multiple node pools, and a preview of Azure Security Center integration for Azure Kubernetes Service for container image vulnerability assessment and Kubernetes cluster threat protection. To learn more about these capabilities and more Azure Kubernetes Service innovations announced today, check out all of the Azure updates. And, to simplify containerized application development for Java developers, we are announcing the preview of Azure Spring Cloud built, operated, and supported in partnership with Pivotal. Azure Spring Cloud is built on top of Azure Kubernetes Service and abstracts away the complexity of infrastructure management and Spring Cloud middleware management.
To realize innovation goals, organizations need to focus on and scale developers’ investments. According to a recent survey by Indeed, over 86 percent of organizations struggle to hire all of the technical talent needed to build applications. Microsoft Power Apps, a low-code tool for citizen developers, expands the pool of people empowered to build applications. With the combination of Power Apps and Azure, citizen developers can easily build business apps that can be centrally managed through IT and easily extended by developers using Azure Functions or APIs to scale innovation across your organization.
Developers are the key to your digital transformation. Empowering developers with the latest technologies and tools is critical to the future success of your organization. Today’s announcements highlight Microsoft’s commitment to ensure every developer has cutting-edge tools to create the next generation of applications and drive innovation with developer velocity.
We have even more to share at Microsoft Ignite. Be sure to tune into Scott Hanselman’s keynote at 9:00 AM EST on Tuesday, November 6th to learn how to build an application in Azure using your language of choice such as Java, PHP, Node.js, .NET, or Python. Make sure to download the code and have fun defeating our bot after the session!
Azure. Invent with purpose.
Source: Azure Blog Feed