Announcing Public Preview of Managed DevOps Pools (MDP) for Azure DevOps

Announced the public preview of Managed DevOps Pools (MDP) for Azure DevOps. MDP is a fully managed service that offers custom DevOps pools, combining the flexibility of VM Scale Set agents with the ease of maintenance of Microsoft-hosted agents. Key benefits include hosting on Microsoft's behalf (reducing management overhead and improving reliability), reduced management time, creation of specific pools for tailored workloads, DevOps billing optimization (up to 50% reduction observed), and enhanced scalability to thousands of agents. Notable features include quick-starter images, standby agents, private networking, bring-your-own-image support, stateful agents, flexible SKU selection, additional storage, and geographic co-location. MDP is available in the Azure Portal during public preview with no extra service-related billing beyond Azure resource costs.