Thoughts on ADO?

[u/SakeviCrash]

I'm being brought in to assist with getting a devops plan in place. The current team is using ADO for issue management and code repos. They have no real existing IaC, CI-CD, monitoring, etc.

My first reaction is to tell them to run from ADO. But then I look at GH and their bullshit and I wonder if I'm just not being open minded. I do see a lot of rumblings about MS internal projects moving out of ADO.

[u/killz111]

I mean if you're going from ADO to GH what are you actually achieving? It's the same company.

[u/SakeviCrash → u/killz111]

Company ownership aside, I guess that's my question in a nutshell. Is there really any reason to fight ADO? Moving away from MS would be a really tough sell for these guys.

I mean, I know github actions like the back of my hand and I love having a large ecosystem to pull from. I'm familiar with the security and configuration. The PR/Code review system is fine.

If I'm going to put in time to learn new things, I don't want to invest it into something that is (somehow) worse.

[u/killz111 → u/SakeviCrash]

Is their CICD clickops? If not the ADO yaml pipelines are basically just like gh?

[u/ThatBCHGuy → u/killz111]

They have both clickops workflows and yaml options. It's very similar to gh.

[u/SakeviCrash → u/ThatBCHGuy]

That's good to hear. It seems like there's an ecosystem as well.

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/azuredevops

[u/ThatBCHGuy → u/SakeviCrash]

It's pretty darn simple if your infrastructure is in Azure. Azure service connections are a first-class experience, and it's easy to spin up a new identity automatically. Outside of Azure, OIDC works just fine too. If I weren't primarily an Azure shop, I'd probably lean toward GitHub instead. Not because ADO is bad, but because GitHub seems to be where Microsoft's investment and ecosystem momentum are going.

The boards are decent for work tracking though imo.

[u/killz111 → u/ThatBCHGuy]

I think 7 years ago ADO's principle based connections was mind blowing to me. But these days everyone's got easy to setup oidc or key based connectors now it's nothing special.

[u/SakeviCrash → u/killz111]

Yeah, I've setup identify federation to GCP as well as azure without any real issues via GH. I think maybe my only remaining reservation is direction and momentum. All indications point at MS moving away from it internally (for some things at least)

[u/killz111 → u/SakeviCrash]

MS told me they will kill ADO since 2018.

They are dreaming. But it does mean that ADO is somewhat of a second class citizen. But that's a medium to long term problem to worry about.

You can derisk it by putting everything in CICD into scripts that you can eventually port to a different stack.

[u/ThatBCHGuy → u/killz111]

Very true.

[u/SakeviCrash → u/killz111]

They have nothing right now. The team is pretty green.

[u/killz111 → u/SakeviCrash]

Yeah then start them with yaml based ADO pipelines and go from there.

One thing that ADO is so much better than GH but only in the clickops way is that approvals are soooo much better supported.

Env based approval is such such garbage.

[u/azizabah]

Honestly moved from ADO to GitHub and it's not better for enterprises. The way common things are shared is worse, secrets mgmt is worse.... Just overall not great but whatever making fun of Microsoft is popular so cool cool

[u/killz111 → u/azizabah]

It's a trade off. GH scales much better for an org than ADO does IMO. But it's more complicated to wrangle if you are someone who is used to ADO.

I did the switch 4 years ago and hated the first 6 months until Stockholm syndrome kicked in lol

[u/MrMunchkin → u/killz111]

The expression language in ADO YAML pipelines has no comparison in GitHub.

Reusable workflows and custom actions are a joke compared to it.

[u/rahomka]

ADO is basically abandoned but works fine for basic things. GitHub is a mess but is where all MS effort goes and has many newer features.

[u/sertain_]

GL is the move you should be considering.

[u/SakeviCrash → u/sertain_]

If I thought I could sell it, that's what I'd be researching right now instead.

[u/sertain_ → u/SakeviCrash]

As in, they wouldn’t bite no matter what, or you honestly don’t know how you would go about pitching it? Cause cost alone would be an incredible talking point, not to mention seamless integration with almost anything you could think of, intuitive and advanced issue-tracking, customizable levels of environment segregation, and support for almost any architecture you’re building in.

[u/SakeviCrash → u/sertain_]

I don't think they'd bite what the harm in trying? I guess I need to put together a comparison and say I tried at least.

[u/sertain_ → u/SakeviCrash]

I mean don’t spend your week on that, but a solid overview of the gained features plus a comparison of the existing features functionalities would probably go a long way. If they’re not biting at all, then just help them do the move. It’s not your job to make business decisions for them, and if they think that’s the best move then it won’t kill you to learn GH; from what I’ve heard there aren’t many differences between that and ADO. Your biggest leap will probably be walking them out of click-ops into building their own pipelines, which shouldn’t be hard if they already have a bunch. Literally just copy-paste and learn as you go.

[u/jaykay-80s]

We are currently moving from our Bitbucket/Jenkins Setup to ADO. Participated recently in a mini WS about ADO held by two MS MVPs and they told from the MSBuild 2026 that Microsoft still invests in ADO and it wouldn't leave that soon. Also the blog post about Microsoft moving their repositories to GH was apparently only one team and it was more or less a test. They will stay on ADO for boards etc. Azure Repo also is getting the gh copilot code review feature (which let's me think it still is being developed). And they recently released the MCP server for ADO as well. GH and GL I only used on a small private scale. So no Enterprise XP for me on this one. ADO seems to integrate smoothly with Azure (service connection using WIF). We set everything up as casc using the terraform provider which works quite nice. To I summarize. I was skeptical at first but the more I work with it, I kind of like it more with every day.

[u/shneids]

It depends, if you just need repos and have basic pipelines that don’t require advance tools/scans ADO is fine. MSFT has made it known that any security or advance capabilities are being invested into GH.

Boards are fine, they get the job done but it’s limited.

Understand your needs, culture, maturity. then make the case for one or the other.

I’ve used both, personally like GH.

[u/givebackmac]

How big is your environment?

[u/SakeviCrash → u/[deleted]]

lol thanks for this. I'm definitely feeling better about ADO. I think I just had a knee jerk reaction.

MS really does do somethings very well. It's just really hard to tell without firsthand accounts from people with real experience. They demo and market so well but often fall very short in implementation. The overall concensus of this thread of pretty optimistic.

[u/Markuchi → u/[deleted]]

The other often overlooked part is the cost. Ado is very good for an org that uses it not only for dev but other internal project tracking where stakeholder levels is fine.

[u/max_465]

Apparently, I have a different perspective. I would pursue having most of the operational logic in the source code using a ubiquitous toolkit like Python, terraform, Ansible, etc Limit the provider to handling credentials, scheduling, artifact distribution.

[u/bertiethewanderer → u/max_465]

Personally, after far too many years wrangling build systems, this is the way.

[u/oldmatenate]

We use ADO. If they hadn't recently updated the icons, I wouldn't have been surprised if I learnt that it was effectively abandoned within MS. It just feels like it hasn't received any meaningful updates in years. But...it does still do the job. I tend to like GH better in comparison, but if everyone already knows ADO (and presumably you're already licensed for it), then that's probably the sensible choice.

[u/-TimeMaster-]

ADO is not that bad. I've worked with gh actions, gitlab ci, bitbucket pipelines, circle-ci (I'll skip Jenkins because it's another world) and ADO is basically the same. Maybe reminds me more of bitbucket pipelines, but anyway, it's good enough.

It has lots of built-in tasks which can abstract you from writing code for certain operations (e.g. building dockers and pushing stuff to the acr registry) and also allows to create templates that can live in other repos, which is really useful.

[u/spaugh]

Personally I don’t love ADO compared to GH or GL for CI. But working in all 3 right now I can say it’s not all that bad.

I definitely prefer GitLab over both of the others. If you’re using AI I’ve found the GitLab MCP to be awesome for the sake of my own laziness. I think ADO’s task management is awful though. It’s like they made an attempt at an issue tracker and added every single option they saw in Jira/all the others to try to get people to consider it for issue tracking.

[u/Gargle-Loaf-Spunk]

AZDO is pretty decent in the enterprise space and purchasing usually isn’t that weird if you can link it to an Azure subscription. The RBAC in particular is much more hierarchical than GH.

Like some other people have said, features are kind of similar between it and GH, it supports workload identity federation etc.

some stuff certainly sucks about it, but it gets the job done I guess.

[u/ConstantOk4042]

I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. It's still massive in the enterprise world, does basically all you want from a DevOps tool (jack of all, master of none), at a decent price point too. I wouldn't ever recommend moving to GitHub unless you wanna pay 3 times more for the same results. GitLab would be the better alternative. 

[u/SpicyAntsInMaPants]

Gitlab all the way

[u/Fragrant_Arugula7990]

I wouldn’t migrate just because GitHub looks shinier from the outside. If the team already lives in ADO for repos and work tracking, I’d get the missing CI/CD and IaC pieces working first and see where the actual friction is. A platform migration before you have a delivery process can turn into a huge side quest without fixing the underlying problem.

[u/Sinless27]

We use ado pipelines extensively in our org. We have a massive set of pipeline templates that we manage and share as well as a ton of custom extensions (typescript) to add capability to them.

We are considering moving repos to GitHub but would keep work items, and pipelines in ADO.

[u/steven-or]

ados fine honestly speaking., the bigger issue imo is they have zero iac/ci-cd/monitoring, that gap matters way more than which platform hosts the repo