Managed DevOps Pools – The Origin Story

This post describes how Microsoft built Managed DevOps Pools, an enterprise CI/CD infrastructure solution that originated from internal challenges at scale.

• •In 2021, Microsoft's 1ES team found 5,000+ self-hosted Azure DevOps pools with hundreds of thousands of agents across the company
• •Key problems included duplicate tooling effort, inconsistent reliability, inefficient scaling, security gaps, and compliance difficulty
• •1ES Hosted Pools was developed internally with features like private networking, custom images, stateful agents, flexible Azure SKUs, and standby agents
• •Adoption cut CI/CD infrastructure costs by over 60% and reduced self-hosted pools from 5,000+ to a few dozen by 2024
• •The solution is now publicly available as Managed DevOps Pools (MDP) for external Azure DevOps customers