Introduction and enterprise growth
The first users of Microsoft's cloud development service, Visual Studio Online, were small consulting companies or remote teams inside companies, because they needed a simple way of working on code together. "They didn't want to spend a lot of time getting up and running and they wanted a hosted solution so they didn't have to worry about VPNs and firewalls," Visual Studio Online chief Brian Harry told us.
"But now we're seeing that larger businesses are very much interested in Visual Studio Online. They like not having to upgrade to get new features – we're constantly showing them new features and they don't want to wait for the next version to get them." Visual Studio Online gets new features every three weeks, rather than the three years you might wait for a new version of Team Foundation Server you can run on your own servers.
Going big
Over the last few months, Harry says he's been hearing from large companies wanting to get on the service. "We have companies of all sizes who are customers and they have groups of 20, 30, 40 people that they put on Visual Studio Online. But in the last three months we've started getting requests from teams with more than a thousand people in."
Microsoft is adding new features to make Visual Studio Online ready for enterprise customers. "As we get these large customers who want to bring their entire enterprise on board with cloud, we're hearing common requests. They say 'we love cloud; we've managed Team Foundation Server ourselves for a long time and what we've come to realise is that we're never going to be as good at it as you are.' But they're also very sensitive about questions of privacy, security and control."
Compliance comes up a lot in these conversations, Harry says. "In January we announced some certification work that we've done to help people feel good about the care we take in protecting the integrity and confidentiality of their data." That included ISO 27001 certification and putting the EU-approved European Model Clauses in the service terms.
Protective fencing
One of the most common requests has been for 'IP fencing'. "They'll say 'I want to have accounts on Visual Studio Online but have it so that only people on my company network can access them'. We're working with the Azure AD team on it and in the next couple of months we'll enable that feature."
That kind of access limitation might sound like losing a key advantage of using a cloud service. "It's not for everyone," Harry agrees. "One of the points of going to the cloud is the access from anywhere to this collaboration. But in this situation, the enterprise wants us to manage things, they like having it always up to date, they like using a SaaS service – but they still want it very private and very locked down."
Other businesses are uncomfortable with their traffic going over the internet, even using SSL. "So we worked with the Azure ExpressRoute team and we've now certified Visual Studio Online to work with ExpressRoute." That's the same thing Office 365 and Skype for Business have done – you can take a private connection from a provider like BT or AT&T and have all your traffic to Azure, Office 365 and Visual Studio Online go directly between your network's and Microsoft's data centres without ever touching the public internet.
Few businesses are asking for 'Bring Your Own Key' options, where they can store encryption keys for a service in their own systems, says Harry. "More often, I'm asked about encryption at rest, which we're working to support." That will secure your code but still let you use key Visual Studio Online features, he explains.
"We need to manipulate your data; we give you deltas of code changes, code analysis, per line code commenting and code reviews – we do all this manipulation of the data that provides value and helps you understand the data, but that has to be done on the service, so we need the encryption key to access your data. We recently announced the private preview of code search, which will give you enterprise-wide code search in your browser, and we can't do that if we can't decipher the data."
Customisation and future features
As well as the security, privacy and auditing improvements Visual Studio Online is getting, it will also offer more customisation. "When you get into large organisations, they inevitably want to customise things – they don't want to use the out-of-the box workflows. For adopting Visual Studio Online inside Microsoft, we have some customisation requirements; you have to be able to create a custom field on work items, and have custom types and flows, so that's something we're working on hard right now. I expect sometime in the middle part of this year we will announce a public preview of our process customisation capabilities on the cloud," Harry predicted.
On the other hand, simplicity can be an advantage. "We've had quite a few companies who, when given the keys go crazy and invent something they later regret. Some customers who've made the move to the cloud have actually said 'we're glad you don't support all this because it forced us to get rid of the crazy customisation we've done!'"
Businesses with a lot of developers may find some longer-term workflow developments more useful. "We're making some investments to really bring the open source style of collaboration and coding inside businesses, where you have transparency and contribution and sharing of code across the organisation. That means you'll be able to identify experts and what they've worked on."
Nadella's vision
Those are the kind of features Microsoft is looking for itself, to deliver Nadella's idea of 'internal open source' and they'll start showing up over the next year or so, says Harry. "Code search is a piece of it – that enables you to go find assets you might be able to share. There's work that we're doing around code reviews and pull requests with Git that enables that cross-organisation sharing. And then a bunch more features will come along that really make that real."
Probably before that, Visual Studio Online will also get more powerful reporting features. If you use Team Foundation Server, you can use SQL Server Analysis and Reporting Services. "That means you can use Excel and Power BI and all that stuff to create arbitrary reports over TFS; we don't yet have that level of depth reporting in the cloud," says Harry. "We have what we call simple charting – you can create snapshot charts, bar charts and tables, simple trend charts…" But larger businesses moving from TFS are going to want the kind of reports they're familiar with.
The more of those features Visual Studio Online adds, the more large businesses will consider the service instead of running TFS themselves. Harry puts the recent level of interest down to the fact that smaller teams in those businesses have found the service useful.
"It's about trying it and seeing that the world doesn't fall apart. If I'm a business, I can try it in small departments and see that it works; I didn't lose all my IP, the service wasn't down all the time, it did work and it was reliable and it was often more reliable than the service I could run myself." It's about getting comfortable with cloud services. "Every enterprise I talk to knows they're going to cloud. Everybody knows cloud is their future – they're all just trying to figure out what their path is. It's about time, experience and comfort."
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