Microsoft has announced a public preview of Managed DevOps Pools in Azure, which allow teams to quickly spin up custom DevOps pools as needed.
“Engineering teams ideally want to spend all their time writing code to create applications and services for their users! In reality, many end up spending a significant portion of their time on other tasks, such as maintaining DevOps infrastructure,” Suraj Guptha, principal manager for product management at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.
According to Microsoft, this offering builds on previous capabilities that were designed to help teams more easily manage the infrastructure they need. These include Microsoft-hosted agents, which manages maintenance and upgrades for the user, and Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set agents, which allows teams to create agent pools using any SKU, image, storage, or network.
Managed DevOps Pools include fully managed VMs that are maintained by Microsoft in a Microsoft owned Azure subscription, not their team’s own Azure subscription (like in Azure DevOps Elastic/VM Scale Set Pools). This reduces time spent on managing agents, improves reliability, and prevents other Azure subscription services from competing for compute cores.
Pools can be created based on a quick-starter image from Microsoft or users can make a custom image. These pools can be connected to resources on their private network, co-located in the closest geographic location, and SKUs can be picked based on the workload’s usage profile.
This customization helps improve performance because they could, for instance, create a pool with a memory-optimized SKU for a memory-intensive build workload. “Creation of specific pools helps teams tailor pools to accelerate the workloads that run on it and eliminates the noisy neighbor problem,” Guptha explained.
According to Microsoft, this new feature can also reduce DevOps bills, and customers in the private preview saw up to a 50% cost reduction.
Interested customers can access the public preview through the Azure Portal, and during this period there will be no additional cost beyond the cost of the Azure resources that are created.
You may also like…
