Migrate To CRM-Linux-US Agent Pool

Introduction

We, the DevEx Team, are starting a campaign to reduce unnecessary and un/under-utilized build agents across the organization. Not only will this reduce costs for the business, it will also improve performance for the developers due to the increased concurrency limits and the autoscaling logic built-in; not to mention the increased hardware capacity.

On March 31, 2023, we will have issued an organizational announcement detailing this campaign with an ultimate goal of deprecating (reducing to just 1 agent) all other Linux-based agent pools across MDTProductDevelopment by April 28, 2023. The only exception is the Azure Pipelines pool (Microsoft-hosted) which will see a reduction in concurrency by about half. This gives development teams 4 weeks (2 sprints) to execute their pipeline migrations before deprecation.

Now, given that we understand there will be pain-points in migrating (there always are), we are initially only DEPRECATING older infrastructure, not outright DELETING. However, 4 weeks (2 sprints) after the deprecation date, April 28, 2023, is the Deletion Date. On May 26, 2023, we will be deleting all the Linux-based agent pools that were in deprecation. By that point, all development teams should be fully migrated, except for utilizing the Azure Pipelines pool where necessary because of Firewall/Network issues (See FAQ for more info).

Basic Migration

To perform a basic migration, assuming you aren't using any other templates in your pipeline, or your templates do not reference another pool, all you need to do is add/replace the pool: configuration in your pipeline YAML, so it looks like this:

pool:
  name: CRM-Linux-US

It's that easy!

What if I use devops-common-templates from another repo?

If you or your team has access to that repo, it is recommended to look through those templates and replace any reference of

pool:
  vmImage: ubuntu-latest

with

pool: 
  name: CRM-Linux-US

If you do not have access, contact the team that does and reference this effort to migrate away from ubuntu-latest.

Windows Pools

We have not yet started working on a Windows AMI that we can use, however, it is the highest priority item on the backlog.

Submit a bug report

Should you run into any errors, I'd like to direct you to the FAQ page first to see if there is already an answer to your problems. If not, feel free to use this form to submit a bug report to the DevEx team. We'll address your issues as quickly as possible.

Submit a feature request

The Linux agents might not support everything you need in terms of building, testing, and deploying your code. If there is another tool, language, program, etc. that is necessary for the work you do, please use this form to submit a feature request. You should also comment any amplifying information on the work item, such as links to where we can get it, what it's used for, etc.