Self hosted agents/pipelines - any Visual Studio subscribers here?

DHR

DHR

DHR

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I'm reviewing our visual studio licensing and am confused regarding the feature comparison table between professional and enterprise subscriptions.

Is anybody using self hosted agents with a visual studio professional subscription? The table says Self-Hosted pipeline's aren't included on the professional subscription, but apparently you get one pipeline free with self hosted agents? This is in relation to Azure DevOps, and not Azure DevOps server too.

Reached out to a Microsoft rep and they seemed as unsure about it as I currently am!
 
I'm afraid I can't help with your question but am interested in the use case. Why do you want a self hosted agent (that you have to maintain etc) rather than a hosted one?
 
Blackstar_solar said:
I'm afraid I can't help with your question but am interested in the use case. Why do you want a self hosted agent (that you have to maintain etc) rather than a hosted one?
Click to expand...
Ha! Don't ask, internal service I'm in the process of trying to get through team to shift cloud side.
 
DHR said:
I'm reviewing our visual studio licensing and am confused regarding the feature comparison table between professional and enterprise subscriptions.

Is anybody using self hosted agents with a visual studio professional subscription? The table says Self-Hosted pipeline's aren't included on the professional subscription, but apparently you get one pipeline free with self hosted agents? This is in relation to Azure DevOps, and not Azure DevOps server too.

Reached out to a Microsoft rep and they seemed as unsure about it as I currently am!
Click to expand...

Can you link to the documentation or table you are referring to and more clearly state your query? I can probably help but not sure what you are asking. Let me include some further questions that will help:

1. Are you definitely using Azure Devops Services rather than Azure Devops Server?
2. What are you trying to achieve?
3. Have you read up on parallel jobs? (This will help you understand costings and how much capacity you will need for self hosted agents)

If you need to run multiple simultaneous pipelines, then you need to pay for additional parallel jobs. For example if you need 5 developers and 2 testers to run builds/pipelines on self hosted machines plus have capacity for releases to run at the same time into Prod, you might need say 10 parallel jobs. Yes you get one free. If you stick with just the free one, you will encounter queuing where they will all get addressed and will run, but you will have the limitation of that single parallel job, despite whether you install and get 55 self hosted agents online and running. ADO services will just limit it anyway.
 
Blackstar_solar said:
Why do you want a self hosted agent (that you have to maintain etc) rather than a hosted one?
Click to expand...

There are a number of reasons why self hosted agents are used. Typically it tends to be due to:

Compliance related (financial services sectors for example)
- You need to interact with secure systems inside a company network that you don't want exposed to Microsoft hosted agents.
- You don't want to manage Microsoft IP ranges/rulings/routes where spawned agents have to come back into your network to touch your infra.

Cost
- Last time I checked, MS hosted agents had significant additional cost for the convenience of using them

Control and performance
- MS hosted agents are limited. With self hosted, you can spec the underlying machine how you want (more ram/cpu etc)
- You can control software/binaries versions
- You can control routes and rulings as to where that agent server can go/do
 
DHR said:
I'm reviewing our visual studio licensing and am confused regarding the feature comparison table between professional and enterprise subscriptions.

Is anybody using self hosted agents with a visual studio professional subscription? The table says Self-Hosted pipeline's aren't included on the professional subscription, but apparently you get one pipeline free with self hosted agents? This is in relation to Azure DevOps, and not Azure DevOps server too.

Reached out to a Microsoft rep and they seemed as unsure about it as I currently am!
Click to expand...

Blackstar_solar said:
I'm afraid I can't help with your question but am interested in the use case. Why do you want a self hosted agent (that you have to maintain etc) rather than a hosted one?
Click to expand...

SHA have a huge benefit to cloud workloads over hosted agents. The number of things that break when using hosted agents has been fairly well documented. As most people want "latest" in their pipelines, when updates or new images are released, you'll find something breaks. From a DevSecOps perspective, SHA > Hosted. You want to open every ADO firewall PIP on your internally boundary just so one hosted agent can make a deployment or config change? No thanks. Do I want granular control of what is deployed on my SHA (and the ability to monitor it at all stages, including output log)? Yes thanks.
 
Also in terms of performance. I'm not sure if MS have been gimping the (already quite poor) performance of their hosted agents, but we've noticed they have been getting slower and slower over the last 4+ years we've been using them. It got to the stage where a full system build was hitting the 60 minute timeout limit, which forced our hand to go SH.

So I moved everything over to an Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set which auto-provisions itself when a build is required, and tears itself down after completion. Not only did it cut our build times down by almost 80% - this is a big project so YMMV (4x .Net web apps/APIs, 6x Azure function apps, 2x Angular apps, 1x Android app, 1x iOS app) - but it actually saved us money as well.
 
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