Can I have multiple Azure DevOps organisations with MSDN Subscription? - azure-devops

I've tried to find an answer to this but nothing that gives anything definite.
I have a MSDN subscription (Visual Studio Enterprise). I have used the benefit from that to create a Azure DevOps environment that works well.
I am looking to create a new set of projects for a specific company, and it seems logical to create a new 'Organisation' to hold that code and work items.
Can you do this with the MSDN license? Or do I need to buy a subscription to bill that Azure DevOps instance to?

Can I have multiple Azure DevOps organisations with MSDN Subscription?
The short answer is NO.
Visual Studio Enterprise and Azure devops are two different products that have their own licenses, they could not share a licenses.
Besides, you can have multiple Azure DevOps organisations for free, but the free tier of resources in your organization is restricted, the Free tier includes:
Five Azure DevOps users (Basic).
Five Azure Artifacts users.
Free Tier of Microsoft-hosted CI/CD (one concurrent job, up to 30 hours per month).
One self-hosted CI/CD concurrent job.
20,000 virtual user minutes of cloud-based load testing.
When you need more than the free tier of resources in your organization, or to buy other features for your users that are offered by Microsoft or other companies via the Visual Studio Marketplace, on the Azure DevOps tab, you need buy a subscription to bill that Azure DevOps instance.
Check following threads for some more details:
Billing overview for Azure DevOps
Pricing for Azure DevOps
Compare features between plans
Hope this helps.

Not sure if Leo entirely answers the question.
Since you do have Azure DevOps as a MSDN benefit beyond the free tier.
MSDN Azure DevOps Benefits
So the question as I understand it is, does the MSDN Azure DevOps benefits follow the user? Or is it tied to just one Organization? Luckily this has just changed or at least been clarified, not sure how it worked before.
Still only states the regular payd plans, and not the MSDN benefits, but I can't see any reason why this should be any different.
One license works across multiple organizations
Starting in late June,
users will only need one license per Azure subscription, even if they
are part of multiple Azure DevOps organizations. This means that
regardless of how many organizations a user is a part of in a given
Azure subscription, they will only need and only pay for one Basic or
one Basic + Test Plans license.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/a-simpler-way-to-buy-azure-devops/

Related

Azure DevOps Server/Services licensing question

Apologies if this is the wrong location for this. We are currently on TFS 2015 and considering a move to either Azure DevOps Services or on-premize Azure DevOps Server 2020.
For DevOps Services, we already have an Azure subscription. Is there an additional charge on top of our existing subscription to use Services?
For DevOps Server, we just purchase a new software license from Microsoft?
"With Azure DevOps Server 2019 you can either pay month-to-month through Azure or you can buy classic software licenses which requires a 3-year commitment. Buying through Azure provides bonus of entitling you to use our cloud service, so you can move to the cloud at your own pace."
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/server/
For Azure DevOps Server 2020, you should first check if you have Visual Studio subscriptions (professional or enterprise) that include the server license. You most likely do, so no need for additional server licenses from Microsoft. Then decide if users that don't currently have the mentioned licenses need either one of those or a basic license, or if they a good to go with just a limited stakeholder access.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/server/
Azure DevOps on-premise costs
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/organizations/security/get-started-stakeholder?view=azure-devops&tabs=agile-process
For Azure DevOps Services, the answer is a bit more complicated. The basic plan is free for 5 team members, and some CI/CD and artifact storage capabilities. Additional CI/CD and storage capabilities, and extra users add costs per month. Test Plans also cost extra. You can calculate costs here:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/
Existing Visual Studio Subscribers can use Azure DevOps with that license, and also bring an extra self-hosted job with them:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/visualstudio/subscriptions/vs-azure-devops
If this sounds confusing, that's probably because it is and I've probably also missed out something here.

Azure DevOps - Help/Service Desk management system

Can someone recommend Help/Service Desk management system which works good with Azure DevOps?
We already have Azure Devops for code management with ci cd and test suites.
I am also considering JIRA service desk management, however thinking a bit scpetical in the lines of having two similar eco systems.
In next few months, we forsee potential clients who makes use of our IT services and would like to support them using service desk management.
Thank you.
By reference to this doc: What features and services do I get with Azure DevOps?, Azure DevOps provide Boards service including Agile process, Basic Process, Scrum process and CMMI process, which is easily sharing information and track the status of work, tasks, issues, or code defects. See: Azure DevOps Labs for details.
In addition, if you use Slack, you can use the Azure Boards app for Slack to create work items and monitor work item activity in your Azure Boards project from your Slack channel. If you use Microsoft Teams, you can use the Azure Boards app for Microsoft Teams to create work items and monitor work item activity in your Azure Boards project from your Teams channel. And Jira, Zappier, Service Now and so on.
BTW, if you use other management system like TeamSupport Help Desk, you could use Microsoft Power Platform to create automated workflows.
After investigation, we found that currently Azure DevOps has no service desk feature, I found a suggestion ticket in Developer community. You can vote and follow this ticket. You can also create a new suggestion ticket here. The product group will review these tickets regularly, and consider take it as roadmap.
BTW, I found this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/azuredevops/comments/cbkxwz/azure_devops_as_a_help_desk_ticket_system/, which provides several choices, you could check it.

Azure Pipelines or Azure Boards for Microsoft Teams - Commercial Azure DevOps to Govt. Teams

Is there a way to add Azure Pipelines or Boards for Microsoft Teams Govt. subscription to a Commercial Azure DevOps subscription. All of our development work is in commercial space, but our Teams is part of our Office 365 Government subscription. I've tried to add the app to Teams, but always get either "Sorry, this didn't work" or "this app doesn't exist or has been blocked by your administrator". The latter is not true as I checked to make sure 3rd party apps are available.
Both use the same Azure AD.
BTW - webhooks don't work either.
Any ideas?
Cheers,
Red
We were able to create most of the Slack / Azure DevOps integration functions (build notifications, code push, etc.) by using Microsoft Power Automate flows. If you have a GCC subscription to Office365, check to see if you have Power Automate.
There are connectors in Power Automate to MS Teams and Azure DevOps which give you the triggers and actions that can produce nearly the same types of messages that we see in Slack. While Adaptive Cards aren't working in GCC yet, you can format the message using HTML and dynamic content:
Example of using HTML in message
The Azure DevOps apps for Teams aren't working in GCC (yet), but with Power Automate you might be able to overcome some of these limitations.

What are the pre-requisite for creating Azure DevOps organization

I have been struggling to find a guidance or best practice documentation for new Azure Tenant who want to start the Azure DevOps Service journey.
The Azure DevOps documentation is created in a piece meal approach and there is no proper documentation about such guidance and it is maddening to scan through several Azure DevOps product/feature to figure out the content I wanted.
From the documentation, I understand that one needs to create Azure Organization and project structure etc. and then users within the AAD (Company's MAC tenant) can be added to Organization or at project level to collaborate.
But if I am a new Organization or Entity that has just acquired a Azure Commercial Cloud subscription then what are the guidelines to setup my Azure DevOps organization?
E.g. Do I have to be a Global Admin of my Azure Commercial
Subscription to first start the Azure DevOps Organization? Or can I be
a Admin for Dev/Test Subscription and then start the Azure DevOps
Organization? Can I use my Dev/test subscription to create Azure
DevOps organization? What are some limitation or restruction with regard to my Azure Subscription in terms of ability to create Azure DevOps organization? What roles are advised to initiate the Organization creation process?
Where is the guidance documentation or best practice documentation around it so we can put a proper governance structure on Azure DevOps - organization/project and users etc.
Here are some high level prerequisite for setting up Azure DevOps Service:
You must have a tenant in Azure Commercial or Public Cloud. You can still deploy and build on other cloud or on-premise. You need public cloud to host your DevOps Org and project configuration and optionally to host the git based code repo.
You need a Subscription in Azure Public cloud tenant
You will need a user with Account Admin, Service Admin or Subscription Admin level privileges to create first DevOPs Organization
After creating the DevOps Organization, Users (scrum master, Managers, developers and testers ) can be invited to these organization from DevOps Organization settings
Users who have Visual Studio (VS) Enterprise licenses will see most of the features in the Azure DevOps Service Organization. So having a Visual Studio Enterprise or professional license subscription is useful and these users are counted as free for Azure DevOps service user pool. These VS license already come with benefit attached and part of those benefit is the access to Azure DevOps service.
It will be greatly beneficial for Admin team (devOps Org management team) to try to understand how Azure DevOps Service Access levels and permission works and how they are mapped to different Visual Studio licenses and how to configure these access for different role of users. You can find useful information in this regard on AzureDocs.
You do not need to have Visual Studio license (it is optional) to use Azure DevOps Service. By default Azure DevOps service is free for small team of 5 developers with limited access to features. So small organization can immediately start using it within their Enterprise Account or Pay-as-you-go subscription. You can add users to your Azure DevOps Service organization irrespective of if they have VS licenses and you can pay for their subscription on a monthly basis.
Also, I will highly recommend training course from Microsoft Learn website on Azure DevOps Service to get excellent understanding of prerequisite and features of Azure DevOps Service. Just search for DevOps keyword and you will find number of courses with different modules that will provide step by step instructions on setting up your first Azure DevOps Service Organization to integrating with GitHub and building pipeline, static code analysis etc.

How do you increase # of self-hosted parallel jobs on Azure DevOps Services using an associated VS Enterprise subscription?

I have a Visual Studio (formally MSDN) Enterprise License.
My newly created Azure DevOps Service does not reflect this when looking at the self-hosted pipeline configuration under Project Settings > Pipelines > Retention and parallel jobs.
According the the (i) info button:
Visual Studio Enterprise subscribers get one self-hosted parallel job
as a subscriber benefit.
Anyone know how I can get my Enterprise Subscription to show through to Azure DevOps Services (formally VSTS)? It was pretty simple to do with TFS, but am drawing blanks on ADOS.
My user account for both my Enterprise account and ADOS are one and the same - I was rather hoping it would just show through - apparently that's not the case.
The best I found was this page - but it's only for TFS and explicitly warns that:
The requested page is not available for Azure DevOps Services. You have been redirected to the newest product version this page is available for.
My initial attempt at asking MS through their online chat "Concierge Service" was met with apathy and a suggestion I ask elsewhere...
Apparently patience is a virtue.
It took several days but eventually (or was it because I also raised this issue on the Azure Developer Community site?) it correctly shows my associated Enterprise Subscription.