Microsoft announced that Managed DevOps Pools for Azure DevOps is now generally available! This milestone marks a significant advancement in improving developer productivity in the CI/CD loop, reducing your cloud bill for ES infrastructure, and minimizing the toil associated with creating and maintaining custom CI/CD infrastructure for your pipelines.
What is Managed DevOps Pools?
Managed DevOps Pools enable development and platform engineering teams to quickly spin up custom DevOps pools tailored to their workload’s unique needs. It combines the flexibility of Scale Set agents with the ease of maintenance of Microsoft Hosted agents, offering improved performance and advanced reliability features. Managed DevOps Pools is a fully managed service where VMs powering the agents are created and managed by Microsoft, reducing the time spent managing agents and improving reliability.
Key Features:
- Tailored Pools: Create pools in any supported Azure region with any SKU, including ARM64 and GPU.
- Custom Software: Customize the software installed on your agents using Microsoft-hosted quick starter images, selected marketplace images, or bring-your-own images.
- Performance and Cost Optimization: Use Standby agent mode to configure predictions that ensure the correct number of agents are ready when needed.
- Private Network Connectivity: The bring-your-own-network feature allows you to connect your agents to resources on your private network and control network security.
New Features:
- Support for New Azure Regions: It is now available in Sweden Central, Brazil South, Japan East, UAE North, Korea Central, and Norway East.
- Easy Discoverability: The Azure DevOps “Add agent pool” UI now includes the “Managed DevOps Pools” option.
- Proxy Support: Set up Managed DevOps Pools to direct network traffic through a proxy.
- IP Address Visibility: You can view the agent’s IP address in the Initialize job step of your pipeline log.
- Resource Group or Subscription Move: Move your Managed DevOps Pools to another Azure resource group or subscription.
- Ubuntu 24.04 Support: Support Ubuntu 24.04 with new images and bring-your-own options.
- Azure Key Vault Integration: Configure your pool to download certificates from Key Vaults.
Looking Ahead
The general availability of Managed DevOps Pools is just the beginning. Microsoft will continuously improve and evolve the service. Upcoming features include:
- Container-based agents
- Support for SPOT VMs
- Managed data disk support
- Trusted root certificates
- Faster pipeline starts
- Log Analytics integration.
More details: Announcing the General Availability of Managed DevOps Pools (MDP) for Azure DevOps – Azure DevOps Blog