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We have 4 servers: Dev, Stage, Test, Prod.

We are getting one free CI/CD according to Microsoft:

1 Microsoft-hosted job with 1,800 minutes per month for CI/CD and 1 self-hosted job with unlimited minutes per month

$40 per extra Microsoft-hosted CI/CD parallel job and $15 per extra self-hosted CI/CD parallel job with unlimited minutes

We are using a self-hosted agent. The question is how many CI/CD do we need to buy? We don't need parallel jobs! Can we use one self-hosted CI/CD (agents) to store the artifacts and deploy to all 4 servers or do we need to buy 1 (free) and 3 ($15 per extra self-hosted)?

riQQ
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Vadim Tomashevsky
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1 Answers1

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You only need to pay for the number of CI/CD jobs you will use. If you're okay having all your jobs for the four environments (Dev, Stage, Test, Prod) waiting in a queue for that single job then you do not need to pay for anything.

However, be aware that a long running job to Stage (for example) will block all other jobs until it completes. And if you use multiple jobs per pipeline you will get no parallelism benefits unless you pay for parallel jobs.

You can also have multiple self-hosted agents, but only one of them will be able to run a job at a time, unless you pay for parallel jobs.

UPDATE: Highlighting Matt's comment below: If you have MSDN or Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers as registered users in the DevOps organization, you'll get one free parallel job for each of those users.

Alexis Murray
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    Worth noting that when self-hosting, you get an additional self-hosted parallel job per Enterprise subscriber. Depending on development team size when working in the Microsoft developer eco-system, this may be more than enough parallel agents for most efforts. Private project: One self-hosted parallel job. Additionally, for each active Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber who is a member of your organization, you get one additional self-hosted parallel job. – Matt Sep 04 '20 at 16:53
  • So can we install the same agent on each of the servers (Self hosted) ? – Vadim Tomashevsky Sep 05 '20 at 07:12
  • The "agent" is just the software that let's you run jobs. You can put as many agents into your pool as you want. Even multiple agents on a single server. But jobs will only run up to your parallel jobs limit. – Alexis Murray Sep 05 '20 at 17:12