Quick Notes150 words
Agent and runner infrastructure — quick notes
Agents and runners — quick notes
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Microsoft-hosted availability | Azure DevOps Services only — not Azure DevOps Server |
| Microsoft-hosted billing | Concurrency — parallel jobs, not minutes |
| GitHub-hosted for Pipelines | Per-minute pay-as-you-go, more powerful VMs |
| Microsoft-hosted state | Clean VM every run — no cache persistence |
| Self-hosted advantage | Caches + configuration persist run to run |
| Self-hosted reasons | Custom software · private network · warm caches |
| Elastic self-hosted | VM Scale Set agents; Managed DevOps Pools now recommended |
| Self-hosted cost | You own patching, upgrades, disk hygiene, credential security |
Traps
- "Use Microsoft-hosted for the on-prem server" — impossible; hosted is Services-only.
- "Hosted agents cache between runs" — false, every run is a clean machine.
- Concurrency billing ≠ per-minute billing; the optimisation differs.