Azure DevOps specifically has a very broken approach to YAML pipelines, because they effectively took their old graphical pipeline builder and just made a YAML representation of it.

The trick to working with this is that you don't need any of their custom Azure DevOps task types, and can use the shell type (which has a convenient shorthand) just as well as in any other CI environment. Even the installer tasks are redundant - in other CI systems, you either use a container image with what you need, or install stuff at the start, and Azure DevOps works with both of these strategies.

So no, it's neither hard nor impossible, but Microsoft's half-assed approach to maintaining Azure DevOps and overall overcomplicated legacy design makes it a bit hard to realize that doing what their documentation suggests is a bad idea, and that you can use it in a modern way just fine. At least their docs do not recommend that you use the dedicated NPM-type task for `npm install` anymore...

(I could rant for ages about Azure DevOps and how broken and unloved it is from Microsoft's side. From what I can tell, they're just putting in the minimum effort to keep old Enterprise customers that have been there through every rename since Team Foundation Server from jumping ship - maybe just until Github's enterprise side has matured enough? Azure DevOps doesn't even integrate well with Azure, despite its name!)

It has been on life support for a long time AFAIK. I designed Visual Studio Online (the first launch of AzDO) - and every engineer, PM, and executive I worked with is either in leadership at GitHub or retired.

It feels clear from an outside perspective that all the work on AzDO Pipelines has shifted to focus on GitHub Actions and Actions is now like 3 or 4 versions ahead. Especially because the public Issue trackers for some of AzDO Pipelines "Roadmap" are still up (on GitHub, naturally) and haven't been updated since ~2020.

I wish Microsoft would just announce AzDO's time of death and save companies increasingly crazy AzDO blinders and/or weird mixes of GitHub and AzDO as GitHub-only is clearly the present/future.

Yeah feels like they should be able to converge actions and pipelines.

Keeping some separation between AzDo itself and GH also requires some balancing. But so far I’m pretty sure I could never sell our enterprise on a shift to GH. Simply not enough jira-esque features in GH with complex workflows, time reporting etc so I can’t see them doing the bigger GH/AzDo merger.

This month's rollout of sub-issues and issue types would be most of what my organization thinks it needs to shift to GH Issues, I believe, barring however long it would take to rewrite some sync up automation with ServiceNow based on those issue types. Of course it will take another 6 months to a year before those kinds of features make it to GitHub Enterprise, so it is still not happening any time soon. (Though that gets back to my "weird" mixes. I don't entirely know why my company is using AzDO SaaS for Issue Tracking but decided GHE over "normal" cloud GH for Repos. But that's not the weirdest mix I've seen.)

I definitely get the backwards compatibility thing and "don't break someone's automation", but at the same time, Microsoft could at least mark AzDO's official Roadmap as "Maintenance Only" and send the message that feels obvious as a user that GitHub is getting far more attention than AzDO can, but is hard to convince management and infosec that a move to GitHub is not just "the future" but "the present" (and also maybe "the past", now, given AzDO seems to have been frozen ~2020).

This doesn’t seem to address the parent comment’s point at all, which was about required non-shell configuration such as for secrets, build parallelism, etc.