Azure Pipelines with unlimited CI/CD minutes for open source

[schwellmo92]

Quote

With the introduction of Azure DevOps today, we’re offering developers a new CI/CD service called Azure Pipelines that enables you to continuously build, test, and deploy to any platform or cloud. It has cloud-hosted agents for Linux, macOS, and Windows, powerful workflows with native container support, and flexible deployments to Kubernetes, VMs, and serverless environments.

 

Microsoft is committed to fueling open source software development. Our next step in this journey is to provide the best CI/CD experience for open source projects. Starting today, Azure Pipelines provides unlimited CI/CD minutes and 10 parallel jobs to every open source project for free. All open source projects run on the same infrastructure that our paying customers use. That means you’ll have the same fast performance and high quality of service. Many of the top open source projects are already using Azure Pipelines for CI/CD, such as Atom, CPython, Pipenv, Tox, Visual Studio Code, and TypeScript – and the list is growing every day.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-azure-pipelines-with-unlimited-ci-cd-minutes-for-open-source/

 

With all the negative posts on this forum about Microsoft I thought I would bring some positivity 

 

Some (a lot of) people in the open-source software (OSS) community have been quite critical of Microsoft's acquisition of Github. This is a step in the right direction for Microsoft to build trust with the OSS community. Usually developers would need to host their own or rent CI/CD agents, which can be quite costly if you need agents for multiple operating systems or use a lot of build time. I think this shows that Microsoft is committed to OSS and is a completely different company to what it was 5+ years ago.

[Syntaxvgm]

1 minute ago, schwellmo92 said:

 

 

Some (a lot of) people in the open-source software (OSS) community have been quite critical of Microsoft's acquisition of Github. This is a step in the right direction for Microsoft to build trust with the OSS community. Usually developers would need to host their own or rent CI/CD agents, which can be quite costly if you need agents for multiple operating systems or use a lot of build time. I think this shows that Microsoft is committed to OSS and is a completely different company to what it was 5+ years ago.

with their recent thing with Visual Studio Code, sure. Whatever ms. 
 

 

[schwellmo92]

1 minute ago, Syntaxvgm said:

with their recent thing with Visual Studio Code, sure. Whatever ms. 

 

<snip>

I honestly think the Visual Studio Code ordeal is overblown, they address all the issues that people have on their FAQ, if you don't like the telemetry you can compile it yourself.

[Guest]

Wow. I thought Azure was deprecated since before the iPhone. 

[Blake]

2 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

I honestly think the Visual Studio Code ordeal is overblown, they address all the issues that people have on their FAQ, if you don't like the telemetry you can compile it yourself.

Correct response here. It's like when everyone jumped ship from github when MS purchased them. Nothing wrong with the product, and most people where like "oh no it's going to be another skype" MS know not to fuck with IT people (apart from ops people, you can test their patches in production now), when every 2nd org with a cloud presence is moving or has moved towards a cloud agnostic approach.

[LAwLz]

Damn that's pretty good. Brings them up to par with GitLab which also offers free CI/CD.

I'd still prefer to stay away from Microsoft though.

 

3 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

I honestly think the Visual Studio Code ordeal is overblown, they address all the issues that people have on their FAQ, if you don't like the telemetry you can compile it yourself.

Like I said to you in the other thread, the big problem I have isn't the telemetry inside VS Code. It's the very sneaky "let's pretend like it's open source" when it isn't that's the problem.

 

3 hours ago, fpo said:

Wow. I thought Azure was deprecated since before the iPhone. 

Azure is very popular. Last time I checked, it had somewhere around 15% market share for cloud infrastructure services. AWS was sitting at around 30% and Google at 10%.

[ScratchCat]

7 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

I honestly think the Visual Studio Code ordeal is overblown, they address all the issues that people have on their FAQ, if you don't like the telemetry you can compile it yourself.

Except that even if you disabled telemetry it wasn't fully disabled, you have to block the requests using the hosts file to silence it.

7 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

All open source projects run on the same infrastructure that our paying customers use. That means you’ll have the same fast performance and high quality of service.

Those customers who need more than the 10 jobs in parallel are probably already paying and the smaller users will not need to upgrade to a paying plan.

What is Microsoft getting in exchange for offering a free service?

 

[chiller15]

4 hours ago, fpo said:

Wow. I thought Azure was deprecated since before the iPhone. 

Azure is one of Microsoft's biggest assets and is only going to get bigger.

[schwellmo92]

15 minutes ago, ScratchCat said:

Except that even if you disabled telemetry it wasn't fully disabled, you have to block the requests using the hosts file to silence it.

The only telemetry they send is that you opted out of telemetry, the rest are from extensions, and again document on their website.

 

15 minutes ago, ScratchCat said:

Those customers who need more than the 10 jobs in parallel are probably already paying and the smaller users will not need to upgrade to a paying plan.

What is Microsoft getting in exchange for offering a free service?

What's your point? 10 builds in parallel is pretty insane, if you need more than that you should definitely be paying.

 

16 minutes ago, ScratchCat said:

Edit: @schwellmo92 They don't provide unlimited CI/CD minutes if you are not using your own hardware.

That's for private repositories, OSS ones get unlimited minutes, private repos get limited minutes.

[Sniperfox47]

2 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

The only telemetry they send is that you opted out of telemetry, the rest are from extensions, and again document on their website.

 

What's your point? 10 builds in parallel is pretty insane, if you need more than that you should definitely be paying.

 

That's for private repositories, OSS ones get unlimited minutes, private repos get limited minutes.

Sorry to be that guy, but the telemetry that you opted out of telemetry *is*, itself, telemetry.

[schwellmo92]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

Azure is very popular. Last time I checked, it had somewhere around 15% market share for cloud infrastructure services. AWS was sitting at around 30% and Google at 10%.

Depending where you look it's:

AWS 30-40%

Azure 15-30%

Google 5-10%

 

Azure growth quarter on quarter has been almost twice that of AWS for the last few quarters, so expect that gap to slowly shrink.

[LAwLz]

50 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

The only telemetry they send is that you opted out of telemetry, the rest are from extensions, and again document on their website.

Not from what I've read.

The posts I've read said even if you disabled all the telemetry you could disable, it still sent info about extensions (not extensions sending their own telemetry, but rather Microsoft collecting info about which extensions you have installed), info about which version you're using, and a few other things.

Also, if you turn off telemetry your program shouldn't send info about itself, not even info that it won't send info. It should just shut up.

 

 

50 minutes ago, schwellmo92 said:

Depending where you look it's:

AWS 30-40%

Azure 15-30%

Google 5-10%

 

Azure growth quarter on quarter has been almost twice that of AWS for the last few quarters, so expect that gap to slowly shrink.

Quarterly growth numbers doesn't mean though. Each percentage unit in yearly growth is worth less the smaller market share you got.

A grown from 1 dollar to 2 dollars is a 100% growth.

1000 dollars to 1100 is just a 10% growth.

 

If both Amazon and Microsoft have a yearly grown of 10% then the gap between Microsoft and Amazon will actually have increased.

Microsoft has been closing the gap slightly in the last couple of years, but you can't really point to their quarterly growth as a reason why.

[ScratchCat]

2 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

What's your point? 10 builds in parallel is pretty insane, if you need more than that you should definitely be paying.

That the offer is so good that I am wondering why they did it. Even larger projects will rarely have more than a few builds running in parallel - if the build/testing time is noticeably smaller than the time to fix an issue then it will easily be able to support 20+ users. 

 

Even Firefox for iOS would be able to run on this for free with only 31 branches assuming the build time is less than an hour or so:

2 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

That's for private repositories, OSS ones get unlimited minutes, private repos get limited minutes.

Corrected.

[Misanthrope]

Ah so we're done with the Embrace and now we're moving into Expand.

 

I wonder what comes next...

[Guest]

4 hours ago, chiller15 said:

Azure is one of Microsoft's biggest assets and is only going to get bigger.

@LAwLz

 

mustve been thinking of silver light maybe then. 

[LAwLz]

1 hour ago, ScratchCat said:

That the offer is so good that I am wondering why they did it. Even larger projects will rarely have more than a few builds running in parallel - if the build/testing time is noticeably smaller than the time to fix an issue then it will easily be able to support 20+ users. 

It reminds me of the time they made Internet Explorer.

 

Netscape threatening the Windows platform? Just copy everything Netscape does and then release it for free so that Netscape can't complete. Microsoft had a ton of money to set fire to while Netscape slowly died out. Once Internet Explorer was dominant they could shape the standards however they wanted, disadvantaging other potential competitors.

 

I get the eerily feeling that they are doing something similar with GitHub. Microsoft usually only acts in their own best interest, so when they are offering something fantastic which they don't benefit from, you should question their motivation. Are they trying to kill competitors? Free CI/CD for open source projects was one of the main draws for Gitlab, which many fled to in order to avoid Microsoft once they bought GitHub.

 

 

26 minutes ago, fpo said:

@LAwLz

 

mustve been thinking of silver light maybe then. 

Probably. Silverlight was a massive flop and was killed off a long time ago.

[Sauron]

7 hours ago, Blake said:

Correct response here. It's like when everyone jumped ship from github when MS purchased them. Nothing wrong with the product, and most people where like "oh no it's going to be another skype" MS know not to fuck with IT people (apart from ops people, you can test their patches in production now), when every 2nd org with a cloud presence is moving or has moved towards a cloud agnostic approach.

Microsoft's track record with this sort of thing is everything but positive. A lot of people moved away from github to have an alternative ready just in case, but many still have plenty of repos on github. There's also the fact that some people simply don't want to support microsoft or use any of their products out of principle (and because of their history). Giving Microsoft any sort of market dominance has proven dangerous. As @LAwLz said, even if on the surface this change seems only positive it might be a power move to shut down some of their competition in the long run.

[schwellmo92]

56 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

It reminds me of the time they made Internet Explorer.

 

Netscape threatening the Windows platform? Just copy everything Netscape does and then release it for free so that Netscape can't complete. Microsoft had a ton of money to set fire to while Netscape slowly died out. Once Internet Explorer was dominant they could shape the standards however they wanted, disadvantaging other potential competitors.

 

I get the eerily feeling that they are doing something similar with GitHub. Microsoft usually only acts in their own best interest, so when they are offering something fantastic which they don't benefit from, you should question their motivation. Are they trying to kill competitors? Free CI/CD for open source projects was one of the main draws for Gitlab, which many fled to in order to avoid Microsoft once they bought GitHub.

The difference now being that Microsoft are selling the cloud, so they don't care if they give you the software for free, as long as you host it on Azure they're making money

[LAwLz]

2 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

The difference now being that Microsoft are selling the cloud, so they don't care if they give you the software for free, as long as you host it on Azure they're making money

Ehm... What? I don't think you understand what is happening here.

They are literally giving away Azure services for free. What used to cost money, is now free if you do it on Microsoft's platform (GitHub). How are they making money from Azure with this move when they are giving it away?

[schwellmo92]

7 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Ehm... What? I don't think you understand what is happening here.

They are literally giving away Azure services for free. What used to cost money, is now free if you do it on Microsoft's platform (GitHub). How are they making money from Azure with this move when they are giving it away?

I should probably quote more specifically, I was responding to "Microsoft usually only acts in their own best interest, so when they are offering something fantastic which they don't benefit from, you should question their motivation". Azure DevOps Build/Release has some really good built-in tasks for integrating with Azure, I'm not sure if it has tasks for other cloud providers, but I guess their hope is if they offer free CI/CD and people see how easy it is to integrate with Azure, that they will use Azure.

[Blake]

11 hours ago, LAwLz said:

Ehm... What? I don't think you understand what is happening here.

They are literally giving away Azure services for free. What used to cost money, is now free if you do it on Microsoft's platform (GitHub). How are they making money from Azure with this move when they are giving it away?

well, easy:

1. they are making it easier to do devops on their systems (and others), more people using their systems means larger market share.

2. More devs that only know or are primarily .net/azure developers mean businesses/enterprise are more likely to push for MS solutions.

3. Most businesses are not open source, therefore they make their money in the closed source space.

 

It's not rocket surgery, they did this back in the 90's and 00's, there is a reason most businesses run off .net internally. Not saying there isn't a large chunk of business not running off the ms platform, but a significant proportion of SME are running of MS' platform.

 

The issue that you, (and others) take is that in the 90's they then tried to use this position of power to stop competition from entering the market.

 

[chiller15]

14 hours ago, LAwLz said:

How are they making money from Azure with this move when they are giving it away?

Because Azure is much bigger than that. Factor in Office 365, cloud hosting, virtualisation, databases, storage, InTune, security, PowerBI and Azure Active Directory. That's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of paid-for services that Microsoft offer within the Azure platform.

[mr moose]

4 hours ago, Blake said:

well, easy:

1. they are making it easier to do devops on their systems (and others), more people using their systems means larger market share.

2. More devs that only know or are primarily .net/azure developers mean businesses/enterprise are more likely to push for MS solutions.

3. Most businesses are not open source, therefore they make their money in the closed source space.

 

It's not rocket surgery, they did this back in the 90's and 00's, there is a reason most businesses run off .net internally. Not saying there isn't a large chunk of business not running off the ms platform, but a significant proportion of SME are running of MS' platform.

 

The issue that you, (and others) take is that in the 90's they then tried to use this position of power to stop competition from entering the market.

 

Business is always larger than the superficial observations people make.  MS plan decades in front (like most businesses),  they have been moving from selling software to selling services for a long time now, it is of no surprise they want to capitalise on the ever growing OSS industry. 

 

I've said it before and I'll say it again, this forum is like two ants on the side of the tree arguing if the tree is growing or not,  One ant says it's definitely growing, and the other ant says with all the authority it can muster, "well I've been on this tree my whole life and it hasn't a changed a bit".  

[LAwLz]

7 hours ago, schwellmo92 said:

I should probably quote more specifically, I was responding to "Microsoft usually only acts in their own best interest, so when they are offering something fantastic which they don't benefit from, you should question their motivation". Azure DevOps Build/Release has some really good built-in tasks for integrating with Azure, I'm not sure if it has tasks for other cloud providers, but I guess their hope is if they offer free CI/CD and people see how easy it is to integrate with Azure, that they will use Azure.

Maybe, but I am not convinced that's their strategy.

If someone someone offers you something that seems too good to be true, then chances are it is.

 

 

5 hours ago, Blake said:

It's not rocket surgery, they did this back in the 90's and 00's, there is a reason most businesses run off .net internally. Not saying there isn't a large chunk of business not running off the ms platform, but a significant proportion of SME are running of MS' platform.

Yes, and the result of those practices was catastrophic for consumers and competitors.

Comparing this move to the moves Microsoft did in the 90's and 00's to gain market monopoly is not exactly something that will bring peace to people who are questioning their motives.

 

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

 

 

1 hour ago, chiller15 said:

Because Azure is much bigger than that. Factor in Office 365, cloud hosting, virtualisation, databases, storage, InTune, security, PowerBI and Azure Active Directory. That's just the tip of the iceberg in terms of paid-for services that Microsoft offer within the Azure platform.

I don't see how you expect free CI/CD to translate into people moving to for example Azure AD.

They are two completely different services targeting two completely different types of users. It just happens to run in the same datacenters. This is like saying Google giving out free Youtube Red subscriptions will bring people over to Google Cloud (their cloud compute platform). It wouldn't.

 

 

19 minutes ago, mr moose said:

Business is always larger than the superficial observations people make.  MS plan decades in front (like most businesses),  they have been moving from selling software to selling services for a long time now, it is of no surprise they want to capitalise on the ever growing OSS industry. 

I don't think anyone denies that Microsoft is trying to capitalize on the OSS industry.

The question is how and what effect with their efforts to capitalize on it have. Like Blake and I have said in this thread, this is similar to the moves Microsoft did in the 90's and 00's, and the effects of that were Microsoft dominated the market and ended up controlling de facto standards which put competitors at a great disadvantage.

And before you say you can't control OSS standards, let me remind you that they have done so successfully several times already, for example the Kerberos protocol.

[mr moose]

10 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

I don't think anyone denies that Microsoft is trying to capitalize on the OSS industry.

The question is how and what effect with their efforts to capitalize on it have. Like Blake and I have said in this thread, this is similar to the moves Microsoft did in the 90's and 00's, and the effects of that were Microsoft dominated the market and ended up controlling de facto standards which put competitors at a great disadvantage.

And before you say you can't control OSS standards, let me remind you that they have done so successfully several times already, for example the Kerberos protocol.

A lot of people are saying they want to kill it, they want to extinguish the "competition" and so on.   All I see is the ja ja binks effect.