Making Sense of Pricing for Azure DevOps to get started

You decide that Azure DevOps is the way to go because you want to make use of all the features. Specifically

• Azure pipelines to build and release code
• Boards to do all your planning
• Repos so you can use, for example GiT as your code repository
• Artifacts to share packages across projects
• Test Plans to help you test what you have built

Azure DevOps Services Costings

DevOps is free for Open Source projects and small projects up to 5 users

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/

Azure DevOps Services

Individual Services

Taking Azure DevOps Services as the starting point, The first area to look at is Individual Services

There are only two individual services to choose from. Pipelines and Artifacts. this would be useful if you choose if you simply want to be able to build code and release it into specific environments and save your artifacts for use across projects

CI/CD -Continuous Integrations and Continuous Delivery or deployment

Along with these two services there are sliders so you can optimise the services for your requirements and it would be helpful if there were more information about the different options

Azure pipeline Options

First of all we need to understand the Microsoft Hosted will be in the public cloud. The jobs are run on a pool of Microsoft Hosted Agents. Basically, each time a job is run, a fresh VM gets created and then discarded after use. and Self Hosted will be ion premises using self hosted agents. .

With the above option you can only run one job at a time for free that runs for 1,800 mins at a time. And remember that your job is building and releasing code.

lets see what happens with Microsoft hosted if move the Microsoft hosted slider to 10?

Its not clear what this actually means. would you be paying £298 per month at the top end if you had 10 developers using the service concurrently, or do you simply pay for what you use.? So if you don’t go to more than one concurrent job at a time its still free?

Azure Artifact Options

This is clearer. Artifacts are stored so you are paying for storage.

User Licenses

If you want to use all or most of the services you can get an individual user License, Much in the same way that you would but in Power BI Pro per user license.

The only difference between the Basic plan and the Basic + Test plans is Test plans but there is a fairly big price difference.

The question is, how useful is testing plans and can you do with out them? Testing plans will be looked at in more detail later

Basic Plan

If you are happy to go without Test plans its worth looking in more detail at the fine points

However….

Azure Pipelines: Includes the free offer from INDIVIDUAL SERVICES and the free offer is specifically for 1 Free parallel job

Does that mean that even paying 4.48 per license you may have extra charges if you run a job in parallel to another developer?

If two developers are running at the same time who gets hit with the charges?

Could this be understood as being if a user puts two jobs out concurrently and if two users have a job running each, this wouldn’t be charged as its per user?

Artifacts 2 GB free per month and then the assumption is that you move on to pay for extra storage. Is this a pay as you go model?

Basic + Test Plans

The same criteria applies to the plan so the same questions still apply

There are no Free plans with this and the cost is £38.76 per user per month so this assumption is that this plan would only be required for users who will need to test the system?

More information is required in regards to Test plans and are they worth the extra £34.28 a month?

Azure DevOps Server

DevOps Server is the on premises offering built on a SQL Server backend. DevOps Server is a good option when all your services are on premises and you have, for instance Microsoft SQL Server 2019

You can either pay month to month through Azure or buy a 3 year software license.

If you buy through Azure it entitles you to use the cloud service.

With either option you need Windows or Windows Server Licenses for the Servers running Azure DevOps Server 2019

Team Foundation Server is now Azure DevOps Server.

Pricing is not established on the web site so it may need to be a call to the Microsoft Sales team to ensure you get the right fit for your needs.

If you already use the cloud the recommendation will be to go for a DevOps Service

However there are still some questions in relation to this and what is the best option, and can these options be mixed and matched when dealing with different types of users?