Question

Is it possible to use Team Foundation Server as a service on a Windows Azure subscription? I know that tfs.visualstudio.com exists and I’ve been evaluating it within the company I work at however I’m thinking for personal projects that I work on at home. Is this possible to do as a service?

Answer 1

[disclaimer – I work on tfs.visualstudio.com]

tfs.visualstudio.com is available as TFS as a service. It’s great for your scenario of working @ home on projects because it’s in the cloud and available from anywhere. It’s also great for groups of folks that want to work together either in a connected or occasionally connected scenario. It takes the burden of deploying and maintaining your own instance with high availability and management off of you and onto Microsoft’s operations – it lets you and your team focus on what you want to do – write code and create product.

You asked about it being on a windows azure subscription. To be clear, you’re not deploying TFS on your azure subscription – tfs.visualstudio.com is a multi-tenant instance of TFS that you can sign-up for that’s deployed on Microsoft’s azure subscription. The invitation codes have also recently been lifted so go ahead, sign up and try it out.

You could however get your own azure subscription and deploy TFS (basics or express) on VM in your own azure subscription.

The pros and cons are:

• tfs.visualstudio.com is currently free and gives you core TFS with little friction.
• having your own instance in your own azure subscription gives you more control – custom work item types etc…
• currently tfs.visualstudio.com offers the core features – source control and inthebox workitem types, If you want sharepoint or reporting services (likely not needed for @ home projects) then you need to deploy your own instance on an azure vm.
• if you deploy your own VM then you have to maintain TFS (upgrade, patch etc…). With tfs.visualstudio.com it just happens for you.
• on tfs.visualstudio.com you get access to newer features sooner (we ship to it every three weeks).

So, in summary, you can (1) deploy TFS on azure as a service if you deploy TFS on a VM. Or, you can (2) be part of the multi-tenant tfspreview.com offering. What you can’t do is deploy your own cloud instance (azure web roles, jobagent worker roles, and sql azure DBs) on your azure subscription.