Traefik gives you some capabilities that are not native to k8s - like traffic shifting (for canary testing) and circuit breaking, amongst other features. While powerful, it is fairly "lightweight" and intuitive, so it's a great tool to add to your toolkit. There are some other tools, such as Istio and linkerd that can perform some similar functions, but they are more heavy to use and configure. For a deeper discussion on this, see this blog post.
Azure is Microsoft's Cloud platform - Azure DevOps (formerly known as VSTS or Visual Studio Team Services, formerly known as VSO or Visual Studio Online) is a DevOps platform including:
- Azure Boards - Work item tracking
- Azure Repos - Unlimited Git private and public repos
- Azure Pipelines - Cross-platform build engine (Linux, MacOS, Windows) for Enterprise grade CI/CD
- Azure Artifacts - NPM, Maven, NuGet and other package feeds with upstreams, including Universal Package feeds
- Azure Test Manager - Manaul test management system
No! Azure DevOps is for any language, any platform. It is really easy to deploy to Azure from Azure DevOps, but you can deploy to any cloud or datacenter too.
Yes - but you don't have to. There is great integration between GitHub and Azure DevOps, so you can leave your code in GitHub and still enjoy Boards or Pipelines in Azure DevOps.
Jenkins is a great build engine - but can be challenging to use for deployment. You can easily consume outputs from Jenkins builds into Azure DevOps releases.
Yes! The Pipeline agent is written in .NET Core, so works on Windows, MacOs and Linux - or anywhere .NET Core runs.