May 8th, 2019

Pay-per-GiB pricing and more Azure Artifacts updates

Alex Mullans
Senior Program Manager

Azure Artifacts is the one place for all of the packages, binaries, tools, and scripts your software team needs. It’s part of Azure DevOps, a suite of tools that helps teams plan, build, and ship software. For Microsoft Build 2019, we’re excited to announce some long-requested changes to the service.

Until now, a separate, additional license was required for anyone using Azure Artifacts, beyond the Azure DevOps Basic license. We heard your feedback that this was inflexible, hard to manage, and often not cost-effective, and we’ve removed it. Now, Azure Artifacts charges only for the storage you use, so that every user in your organization can access and share packages.

Every organization gets 2 GiB of free storage. Additional storage usage is charged according to tiered rates starting at $2 per GiB and decreasing to $0.25 per GiB. Full details can be found on our pricing page.

Included in all on-premises versions

Updated 6/12/2019: Azure Artifacts is now included with every Basic license for Team Foundation Server (TFS) 2017, TFS 2018, as well as Azure DevOps Server 2019.

Python and Universal Packages are GA

We’ve had support for Python packages, as well as our own Universal Packages, in public preview for some time. As of now, both are generally available and ready for all of your production workloads.

What’s next: public feeds

If you’re developing an open source project using a public Azure Repo or a repo on GitHub, you might want to share nightly or pre-release versions of your packages with your project team. Azure Artifacts public feeds will enable you to do just that, backed by the same scale and reliability guarantees as the private feeds you use for internal development. Interested in joining the preview? Get in touch (@alexmullans on Twitter).

Capabilities of Azure Artifacts

With Azure Artifacts, your teams can manage all of their artifacts in one place, with easy-to-configure permissions that help you share packages across the entire organization, or just with people you choose. Azure Artifacts hosts common package types:

  • Maven (for Java development)
  • npm (for Node.js and JavaScript development)
  • NuGet (for .NET, C#, etc. development)
  • Python

Screenshot of Azure Artifacts

If none of those are what you need, Azure Artifacts provides Universal Packages, an easy-to-use and lightweight package format that can take any file or set of files and version them as a single entity. Universal Packages are fast, using deduplication to minimize the amount of content you upload to the service.

Azure Artifacts is also a symbol server. Publishing your symbols to Azure Artifacts enables engineers in the next room or on the next continent to easily debug the packages you share.

Artifacts are most commonly used as part of DevOps processes and pipelines, so we’ve naturally integrated Azure Artifacts with Azure Pipelines. It’s easy to consume and publish packages to Azure Artifacts in your builds and releases.

We’re excited for you to try Azure Artifacts. If you’ve got questions, comments, or feature suggestions, get in touch on Twitter (@alexmullans) or leave a comment.

Author

Alex Mullans
Senior Program Manager

I lead the Azure Artifacts team in Azure DevOps.

21 comments

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  • Bright Ran

    Now, Azure Artifacts charges only for the storage you use, so that every user in your organization can access and share packages.”
    But the Stakeholders in our Organization still can’t access Azure Artifacts, if the user still need a Basic access?

  • Nick Williams

    Hi Alex, bit late to the party. You mentioned below that `There is no more user license for Azure Artifacts - every user in the organization can access any package feeds they have permissions to.`
    Do users accessing the artifact feeds still need to be at least a basic user? I've tried adding a stakeholder via the artifact feed 'Add User' option but get the below error message when tring to access a nuget feed....

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  • Leo Liu (Wicresoft North America Ltd)Microsoft employee

    Hi, Alex. I want to know if the packages comes from upstream package is charged?

    • Alex MullansMicrosoft employee Author

      Yes, all packages, including those saved from upstream sources, count against your storage meter.

  • jack N

    Hi Alex , our users with VS Professional subscriptions can’t access the symbol server anymore. When they try to connect in VS – options – debugging, they can’t connect. But others with an enterprise license are able to connect to it. It seems like the symbol server requires an enterprise license. Could you tell us why the enterprise license is required? Thank you!

  • Ben Dursley

    Hi Alex - Will we be able to see a breakdown of what package(s) are using our storage, rather than just a flat amount?We're using quite a lot more than I'd expect, so would be good to understand the full breakdown.

    Also, what happens to the charges for the Package Management users we had?  As our organisation is around a year old, do we lose paying for those for 12 months, without incurring other charges, as...

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    • Alex MullansMicrosoft employee Author

      Yes, in the next few months we expect to add more visibility into the storage you’re using.

      As an existing user of Azure Artifacts, you get unlimited free storage for 12 months and no user-based charges before the consumption-based pricing commences.

  • Ali Moghrabi

    Hey Alex, I’m not sure if I’m overlooking this information; I don’t see anything regarding the tiered storage rates other than pricing starts at $2/GB and goes as low as $0.25/GB. Would you be able to tell me the pricing of the different storage tiers?

    Thanks!

  • spashx

    Hi,
    What does this means for a on premise deployment of Azure Devops Server ? It is still required to purchase an additional license (or have Visual Studio Enterprise) to use Artifacts ? Any changes in the near future (Azure Devops Server Update 1) ?
    Thanks.

    • Alex MullansMicrosoft employee Author

      As of Azure DevOps Server 2019, Azure Artifacts is included with your Basic license. Previous versions of Team Foundation Server still require the per-user license.

  • Vladeta

    How can we check how much of space we already use in artifact feed?

  • Alex Chong (International Supplier)Microsoft employee

    Now, Azure Artifacts charges only for the storage you use, so that every user in your organization can access and share packages. Does it mean everyone in the Azure Organization could access the Azure Artifacts with out any other separated license? So we won’t bug addtional license for Azure Artifacts, right?

    • Alex MullansMicrosoft employee Author

      There is no more user license for Azure Artifacts – every user in the organization can access any package feeds they have permissions to.

      • Alex Chong (International Supplier)Microsoft employee

        Thank you very much. I will confirm it in my Organization. Wish you everything goes well!

  • Alex Chong (International Supplier)Microsoft employee

    Hi, I read the Sign Up for Azure Artifacts. In Pay for Artifacts, it mentions the how to pay for the more storage. But could you tell me about how to add new users? Seems there is a paid limit. Does it mean we need to purchase more Azure basic licenses for the users?