What is Managed DevOps Pools?
Managed DevOps Pools empowers development teams to quickly and easily spin up Azure DevOps agent pools that are tailored to their specific needs. The service implements security best practices, provides ways to balance cost and performance, and significantly reduces the time teams spend creating and maintaining custom pools.
Microsoft describes Managed DevOps Pools as an evolution of Azure DevOps Virtual Machine Scale Sets agent pools. It simplifies custom pool creation further and improves the scalability and reliability of custom pools. It is a fully managed service: the virtual machines or containers that power the agents live in a Microsoft Azure subscription rather than your own.
Core Features
- More powerful agents than out-of-the-box agents, using virtual machine images you build for your CI/CD workload
- Agents in the geographical region closest to your dependencies
- Scaling based on your configuration, up to thousands of agents running simultaneously
- Agent state maintained for up to seven days so builds benefit from cache hits
- Long-running jobs of up to two days
- Access to resources in your company network, or isolation to specific endpoints
- Agents with the same software as Microsoft-hosted Azure Pipelines agents
- View of all active agents and the status of agent provisioning and reimaging
- Attach a data disk instead of choosing a larger edition purely for disk space
- Azure Key Vault integration, proxy support, and Ubuntu 24.04 support
Typical Use Cases
Team-specific pools
Because pools are easy to create, platform engineering teams set up multiple team-specific pools. That prevents noisy neighbor situations and tailors pools to the needs of individual teams.
Self-service with governance
Platform teams can empower development teams to create their own custom pools without compromising governance, by allowing the use of curated images and networks.
Builds with company network access
Pipelines that need to reach internal artifact repositories or databases get controlled access to the company network.
Migrating from scale set agents
Existing Azure DevOps agent pools on Virtual Machine Scale Sets can be moved to Managed DevOps Pools; Microsoft provides a comparison of the two approaches.
Benefits
- Less time spent managing CI/CD infrastructure
- Team-specific pools prevent teams from interfering with each other
- Self-service for development teams without losing governance
- Azure cost optimization aligned to your CI/CD workload
- Scalability up to thousands of agents running simultaneously
- Microsoft security best practices as the baseline, extendable with your own controls
Integration with innFactory
As a Microsoft Solutions Partner, innFactory supports building your CI/CD platform on Managed DevOps Pools: selecting and maintaining images, designing the network and isolation model, integrating Azure Key Vault, and migrating existing scale set agent pools.
We also advise on optimizing pipeline cost and securing the build environment. Contact us for a no-obligation consultation.
Typical Use Cases
Technical Specifications
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Managed DevOps Pools?
Managed DevOps Pools empowers development teams to quickly and easily spin up Azure DevOps agent pools tailored to their specific needs. It implements security best practices, provides ways to balance cost and performance, and significantly reduces the time teams spend creating and maintaining custom pools.
Where do the agents run?
Managed DevOps Pools is a fully managed service. The virtual machines or containers that power the agents live in a Microsoft Azure subscription rather than your own, similar to using Azure DevOps Virtual Machine Scale Sets agent pools.
How long can jobs run?
Managed DevOps Pools supports long-running jobs up to two days long. Longer pipelines can be run by splitting them into multiple shorter jobs that each complete in two days or less.
What came with general availability?
In the section 'What's new for Managed DevOps Pools GA', Microsoft names additional Azure regions (Sweden Central, Brazil South, Japan East, UAE North, Korea Central, Norway East), Azure Key Vault integration, proxy support, viewing the agent IP address in the Initialize job step, moving pools to another resource group or subscription, and Ubuntu 24.04 support.
How secure is network access?
Pools can access resources in your company network or be isolated so they reach only specific endpoints. Certificates can also be provisioned through Azure Key Vault during provisioning; for that you configure a managed identity on your pool and grant it permissions to access secrets from your key vault.
Note: All product information on this page has been compiled with care, but is provided without guarantee and may be outdated or incomplete. Cloud services evolve rapidly — features, pricing, SLAs, and availability change frequently. Authoritative and up-to-date information can only be found on the official product page of Azure (official documentation). This page does not represent an offer by Azure.
