Azure DevOps and GitHub: The right balance

Developers love to leverage appropriate tools and techniques to be more productive and excel in whatever they do. When they find the right tool on the market, it brings excitement! (and of course some reservations).

Over the years, GitHub positioned itself from a source code hosting service into a complete application life cycle management service. With the recent additions of codespaces and Copilot, GitHub is taking the developer experience to a new level by being more agile and collaborating seamlessly.

Microsoft also recently launched an offering Azure Dev Box to fill in some of the shortcomings of codespaces. Azure DevTest Labs, which has been around for several years also falls into this category.

This raises an interesting question on how organizations can make use of GitHub along with their existing Azure DevOps ecosystem.

Though GitHub overlaps with a lot of Azure DevOps features, there is no need to panic. It can still be the centerpiece of the organization.

The recent improvements in GitHub have made it a comprehensive product in most feature categories and address some niche areas where Azure DevOps is not. This means that you need to supplement Azure DevOps with extensions and external tools.

As an example, Azure DevOps does not have the code scanning tool natively. Azure DevOps Boards is better for certain types of dashboards whereas GitHub insights is better for tracking developer velocity such as repository activities.

Organizations should start evaluating GitHub, develop internal skills, and pilot using GitHub features. They can also mix components of GitHub and Azure DevOps to make use of the best components for each use case.

Mixing GitHub and Azure DevOps components will also allow organizations to take advantage of innovations that are available exclusively in GitHub such as codespaces.

Organizations adopting the above approach in striking the right balance between Azure DevOps and GitHub can reap the benefits from best of both worlds.