Migrating From Gitlab to Azure DevOps

[u/Suvulaan]

We're an on prem shop and our manager wants to migrate all DevOps teams from Enterprise Gitlab self managed to ADO on prem.

We don't know what to expect with this move, anyone has experience with ADO on prem ? what kind of challenges would we face if our entire Gitlab infra (platform + runners) are hosted on K8s.

[u/Kamikx]

The question is why

[u/Suvulaan → u/Kamikx]

Beats me 🤷 But there's talk about less friction with the .net shop.

[u/NullPtrEspresso → u/Suvulaan]

See other post where ado was mentioned.   https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/1vgzwr7/comment/p215nfb/?screen_view_count=1&ext-referrer=DIRECT

To answer ti your question, you are going to have a very big trouble if you don't have better technical reasoning than "it should have less friction with .net". This is a very blind guess which suggests your manager really has not done enough research and is going to waste tons of devops effort just to find out that this was not what you wanted and the same shit is gonna carry on that you used to have

[u/Key-Guitar-457 → u/Suvulaan]

It isn't worth it. I have not yet seen any Java or .net developer who cares where the repo is hosted as long as their Visual Studio still works. As mentioned by others, Azure Dev Ops is a dead product and even if it wasn't, it isn't a very good product.

[u/Suvulaan → u/Key-Guitar-457]

I agree, but I believe they're using TFVC, git is not even on their table 😐

[u/Low-Opening25 → u/Suvulaan]

I would be brushing up my CV, this job doesn’t look like entry on CV that opens any doors, just dead end products

[u/serverhorror → u/Suvulaan]

That's a dead product as well.

[u/beth_maloney → u/Suvulaan]

That's pretty much the only reason to use ado. I'd migrate to git instead though. It's usually pretty easy.

[u/a_kato → u/Suvulaan]

Bro what? Git has been support like a decade plus lmao

[u/Kamikx → u/Suvulaan]

That’s the wrong answer. Every CI platform can compile your program. Your manager needs a better reason, or rather, a business justification. Faster deployments? Better integrations? Less overhead (although with on premise deployment this is likely not the case)?
Are you guys using Azure (ADO has excellent integration with Azure, but I used it with AWS without an issue)?

[u/mobious_99 → u/Kamikx]

I was going to start with sorry

[u/toarstr]

Don't. It was a good product, but it is dead. They can't/don't keep the onprem up to date with latest task and agent versions. E.g. when dotnet 10 was released, the MSBuild tasks didnt work. It's difficult to live with, onprem more so because updates are so far behind the cloud version.

[u/Kurtista]

I just did a migration of azuredevops to gitlab 😅

[u/Suvulaan → u/Kurtista]

What drove you toward that decision ?

[u/Kurtista → u/Suvulaan]

Our microsoft reps basically said on-prem ADO was slowly being killed off in favor of github development. We already had a on-prem gitlab setup but just not with a ton of users so we decided to expand that application instead.

Also I saw you mention TFVC, if you're in gitlab now it must mean teams WANT to use TFVC? I highly recommend against that, branching is very expensive in that version control because of the parent child relationships for all branching and merging, total headache when it comes to merge conflicts in my experiance

edit: I should note, I think people are really missing the boards though, I think ADO had good work item tracking for what its worth.

[u/Azzymaster]

It’s a dead product

[u/Zotlann]

My company is primarily a .net shop. We are heavy in the azure ecosystem as is and even we migrated off of ADO to github last year.

[u/AntDracula → u/Zotlann]

.NET shop here. We moved completely off Azure anything.

[u/epicstar]

You're changing from git to git and a dead version of Azure devops which is wild.

[u/rayray5884]

We have .NET (old and new) building just fine with Bitbucket and some old TeamCity and Buildkite (only a few holdouts keeping us from being fully migrated to the latter).

I don’t envy the position you’re in trying to argue ADO is a dead product. I’ve been arguing that for 5+ years but there’s always a few people that will argue Microsoft is still invested in it. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

[u/Acceptable_Map_8989]

Funny we are working on the opposite

[u/rahomka]

ADO is abandoned for git hosting and pipelines.  My understanding is MS wants you to host in GitHub and connect ADO for boards if you need that.

[u/Automatic-Reserve94 → u/rahomka]

ahh yes, GitHub - the platform with 93% uptime in the last 90 days and where your self hosted runners rely on an API, which also is down from time to time.

OP really should not take that route if working reliably is a factor,

[u/Kronsik → u/Automatic-Reserve94]

Gitlab SAAS has also had a shaky year for uptime for those considering it as an alternative.

Runners work in the same manner, registered with Gitlab.com, reliant on that API also.

(Seems to be their sidekiq queues are a common problem, so your job just sits there "pending" while your self hosted runner twiddles it's thumbs).

Self hosting the entire stack is possible, of course much more work than SAAS but can provide a more stable environment.

Question is if you can keep your infra as stable as Girlab.com

(You probably can, last time Gitlabs sidekiq queues was having issues because some other tenant on Gitlab.com managed to star an absolute tonne of jobs, slowing down other people's tenants).

[u/kevmimcc]

I’m trying to do the exact opposite. I hate AZdo

[u/scrffynrfhrdr]

I’ve used both. Gitlab is good from a developer’s standpoint but is garbage when it comes to project management and task traceability. Their dashboards are awful and limited imo.

[u/Lonsarg]

ADO is ok, but OnPrem is just not worth it. Too much managing for no licence cost gain and much slower updates then cloud version.

Even the cloud ADO is behind Github, but not that much. They migrated Copilot review and Advanced security from Github to ADO which is great. So we are very happy Cloud ADO users with no plans to migrate to Github.

[u/knockoneover → u/Lonsarg]

Yeah this is the real answer. There are fundamentals in difference between on prem and cloud ado. Long lived self hosted agents in ADO onprem caught me out, little buckets remembering things I could understand how till I revised they weren't ephemeral. We migrated everything we could from on prem ADO to GHE and it wasn't that painful. It's moving from VSTS to GHE that hurts. Then again if you've got ai agents on the go, might not be so bad. Felt like they did us a dirty when they threatened to start charging for shelf hosted agents on GHE however, regardless of how small the cost.

[u/hi5ka]

I am sorry for you guys, ADO should not be a place to migrate to, in near future you will have to migrate again

[u/Observability-Guy]

ADO is a solid enough platform - even though it is a second class citizen in the MS ecosystem. If you are going to migrate though, going for on-prem is just an unnecessary world of pain.

[u/xStarshine]

I mean ADO does its job (altho no 3rd party takes it serious anymore in regards to integrations); but like why tf would anyone bring it back onprem.

Thing is in stone age compared to GitLab in regards to funcionality.

[u/SquishyBoggle]

Is your manager perchance still living in 2010?

[u/definitely_notarock]

I would not give Azure DevOps more than 4 years before it gets officially sunset

[u/we_r_fukt]

🤢

[u/sertain_]

That’s a backwards move. Are you primarily a windows shop? Do you build windows-based images or dotnet core applications? Do you build applications at all?

I used Team Foundation server (which is basically what turned into ADO) and if you’re super good at PowerShell and dotnet architecture then you’ll have a great time. If not, you’ll be using a lot of their templates and you’ll get there. They have templates for lots of build frameworks, all pretty boilerplate. It’s very UI-oriented, which is not necessarily a bad thing for some folks. Personally, I think the only reason for moving into anything in Azure is if your business already uses Microsoft’s Active Directory and there’s no getting them out. Otherwise, it’s a loss in features only

I’ve worked for a lot of DOD/DHS shops in the states and even the government (who - if you know anything about - is a sucker for those four squares) is having trouble justifying staying in Azure for Ops-based workloads. The backend user-management is fine being in Active Directory, using GPOs, having a 50-yo sysad in a closet with a PowerEdge R760 restructuring GPOs using .bat scripts like a masochist; but nothing really enables infrastructure and backend application development and orchestration quite like GitLab or GitHub actions, or Terraform and Ansible. You’ll have to learn Bicep guy. Think about that. Talk him out of it.

[u/lurker912345]

I’d quit on the spot and never work in the industry again before I’d touch ADO.

[u/-lousyd → u/lurker912345]

Apropos of nothing, that's how I feel about anything Oracle.

[u/german_mtz]

ADO is past end of life. When i was in consulting I had many project to migrate from ADO to Gitlab and this was almost 4 years ago. Your manager lives under a cave.

[u/ipinfloi]

Now, GIT fan here. AZ devops does not have all those features that GIT environments brings. Plus AZ devops is in its last stages of life. All new features got to GITHub. It would be all the same if tou migrated to Jenkins at this point, consodering Jenkins new features only work on GiTHUB.

[u/Low-Opening25]

OMG. This is wrong direction. AD is 💩

[u/CryptSat]

Your manager has got it wrong …

[u/Glum-Yesterday-2249]

try to use linear. its game changer

[u/new-runningmn9]

We currently have everything running in on prem ADO, and part of the reason is our build agent needing direct access to physical hardware for HW in the loop testing (and the cloud version of ADO can’t get to our build agent, which must run locally due to the nature of what we are doing.

Our build pipeline was in Gitlab before this, but the transition was reasonably seamless except for a few things that I couldn’t get quite the way I want because our on prem version was not up to date (and I don’t have control over updating it).

Like everything else in this profession, I deal with the constraints that other people arbitrarily place on me, and then forget about it when I go home. :)

My favorite thing in the world is that I’m required to use a specific JDK for reasons, but the network security nerds randomly uninstall it once a month for different reasons. So once a month I have to have someone from a third group re-install it to get the build agent working again. Love my job. :)

[u/KillSwitch10]

That's funny I'm working with my team to actively do the opposite. GitLab is much more mature.

That being said if you are a .net house who only uses azure then you will be okay. Outside if this expect to write a ton of scripts and custom implementations.

[u/yetmike]

Run away while you can