With TFS 2010 a basic installation of TFS has been reduced to a matter of clicks, the pain however lies in getting an appropriate environment provisioned from the Infrastructure team. There will be planned and unplanned downtime as the infrastructure team takes the environment down for patching. There are various TFS hosting services available out there that’ll take this pain point away from you. Some of the leading players amongst others include DiscountASP.net, TeamDevCentral, Praktik Hosting… recently Microsoft has also entered this space with ‘TFS Service’, being part of the Technical Access Preview for TFS Service with Microsoft I had a good play with the offering, you can read more about the TFS Service review here. Though 2 major releases of TFS Service have been successfully rolled out, the offering is still in preview and no official release or pricing information has been made public.
The DiscountAsp.net service is production ready, has received Best TFS Hosting Provider 2011 Award and Brian Harry posted a great recommendation on why you should consider using DiscountAsp.net, these were reasons enough for me to try out DiscountAsp.net Hosted TFS offering myself.
Your enterprise might have a different scale to access the hosting service but personally I would measure against stability, security, easy of use and extensibility.
Availability
Architecturally Team Foundation ‘Server’ 2010 requires the ‘Server’ to be up and available for smooth uninterrupted functioning of development activities, more on server based workspace architecture here. This makes server availability from the hosted service all the more important. DiscountASP.NET promises a planned up time of 100 % per month, any planned maintenance window is communicated and broadcasted at the customer forum well in advance. More on hosted TFS SLA terms & conditions (including details of claiming money back in case SLA is not met).
Security
Ask yourself “Am I comfortable hosting my source code outside my enterprise?” One of the biggest hurdles for customers deciding between on premise and hosted TFS is security. DiscountAsp.Net implements security at all levels,
| Security Standards | Network Security | Data Security | Physical Security |
| - Order forms and control panel use standard SSL encryption
- Enforce strong password usage
- DiscountASP.NET is PCI compliant
- Quarterly PCI scan of all TFS servers
- TrustE EU Safe Harbor certified | - Redundant IP connection
- Redundant Juniper firewalls
- DDOS Migration service subscription
- Inter-server communication on a private subnet
- Only authorized System Administrator can access servers
- System Administrator access is recorded and stored | - Data transfer encrypted with SSL
- File Transfer only allowed using FTP over SSL
- Nightly backups
- Servers and software are kept up to date with security patches. | - SAS70 Certified data center
- RAID 10 disk arrays
- Biometric verification datacenter entry
- 2 level, man-trap, security access
- All camera footage is recorded and held for a minimum of 30 days
- Level 5 bullet-resistant walls / glass (Kevlar Lined walls) & more… |
More details on security and standards offered by DiscountAsp.net for the hosted TFS offering. You might want to ask yourself again whether you are comfortable hosting your source code outside your enterprise!
Ease of Administration
You have the ability to manage users, groups, permissions, add-on, build servers, etc from the web based TFS Hosting Control Panel.
Add-on’s
Some great add-on’s that you can opt for,
- Free migration from Visual Source Safe to Hosted TFS Migration until June 30, 2012 check for details here.
- Urban Turtle – scrum tool for agile project management for a very nominal cost of $5 month/ user.
- TFS Build Server – TFS Build Servers are available from both US based and UK based data centre, more details.
Payment Plans
Very flexible payment plans, you can scale down to just 1 user or scale up to meet the usage demands of your team, expect to pay around $ 20 month/user. With 6+ user enrolment you are promised some excitement with Tiered Pricing Discounts. The contract term is monthly and no minimum contract commitment.
Check the most up to date pricing information here.
Resources
DiscountAsp.net has great a ecosystem of community support forums, KB, tutorials and other useful resources to get you on your feet up and running in the shortest possible time. Last but not the least you don’t want to invest in an offering or company that is here today and might disappear tomorrow. DiscountAsp.net has a great track record established in 2002 the company has grown tremendously, the team has constantly added one niche offering after the other, the latest being managed TFS Hosting, this shows great commitment and confidence in the brand.
Conclusion
I have 5 team projects on my hosted TFS collection and am using TFS to its full ALM potential, the service is very stable and there has been no downtime reported in my run of 2 months so far. The centralised website based administration of TFS 2010 makes TFS administration seamless. I have been able to easily scale up and down the team size every time I needed to without any bottleneck delays. Very impressed by DiscountAsp.Net so far. If you need more information click here, you can also follow @Discountasp for up to date news & offers.