Change in Azure Pipelines Grant for Public Projects

Vijay Machiraju

Azure Pipelines has been offering free CI/CD to open source projects since September 2018. Because this amounts to giving away free compute, it has always been a target for abuse – especially crypto mining. Minimizing this abuse has always taken energy from the team. We would prefer to put this energy into making our products better for users that follow our terms of use. Over the past few months, the situation has gotten substantially worse, with a high percentage of new public projects in Azure DevOps being used for crypto mining and other activities we classify as abusive. In addition to taking an increasing amount of energy from the team, this puts our hosted agent pools under stress and degrades the experience of all our users – both open source and paid.

To address this situation, we are making some changes – effective immediately:

  • New public projects created in Azure DevOps will no longer get a free grant of concurrent pipelines. As a result, you won’t be able to run pipelines when you create a new public project.
  • If you are a maintainer of an open-source project, you are likely already using a GitHub repository to manage your source code. So, we strongly recommend using GitHub Actions for your CI needs. This provides a more integrated experience with your repositories.
  • If you still decide to use Azure Pipelines, then we are working on a process to support your needs. Please stay tuned while we finalize this process. We will post an update in this blog as well as in our documentation, once we have it ready for you.

Note that:

  • This change does not impact our existing open-source or public project users. It only impacts new projects that you create in new Azure DevOps organizations.

We are sorry for the inconvenience this will introduce for open source customers wishing to use Azure Pipelines for CI/CD. Unfortunately, we believe that this is necessary for us to continue providing a high level of service to all our customers.

Update (6/7/2021):

We now have an updated process for you to request the free grant of parallel jobs in Azure Pipelines. Please fill out this form.

We will review your request and respond within 2-3 business days.