Last November, Microsoft launched Visual Studio Online, formerly known as Team Foundation Service, in preview. Today, at its Build developer conference in San Francisco, the company announced the general availability of Visual Studio Online.
As is so often the case with Microsoft’s preview launches, the main difference between the preview and this general release is that Visual Studio Online now includes an SLA, which in this case is a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.
As Microsoft told me, Visual Studio Online already has 1 million users — a 3x increase over the past four months. Microsoft’s corporate vice president of the Developer Division Soma Somasegar told me the service is now getting 100 million requests per day and has received 2 billion requests in the past month alone. That’s some pretty strong momentum and highlights that many developers are interested in these kinds of online solutions.
At the same time, though, Microsoft admits that users may sometimes want to switch back and forth between cloud and on-premise solutions. As part of today’s update, the company announced, Visual Studio Online users can now export their data to an on-premise Team Foundation Server, too. This should make this solution quite a bit more interesting for businesses that were on the fence of using Visual Studio Online or think their needs may change over time.
Microsoft has often noted that Visual Studio Online is more than just the Team Foundation Server in the cloud. It does, however, consider it the “next evolution of TFS and Team Foundation Service,” but with the added benefit of being cloud-native. It also includes features that aren’t necessarily possible on the server, including more analytics and real-time application monitoring.
