Script / guidance to prepare ScaleSet image

[KlausLinzner]

Hi,
We're running into limits with the hardware resources on the Microsoft Hosted Build Agents in Azure Devops. The documentation at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/hosted made it pretty clear that there's no way that hardware can be expanded.

Above referenced documentation also mentions that the alternative for it is to use Azure ScaleSets - which in theory would be a perfect fit. However, it's a huge PITA to configure one of the available images so we can have a rather seamless migration from Microsoft-Hosted to ScaleSet. As I understood from #176 it's not possible for you to provide those images due to legal reasons.

But while you're not allowed to provide those images directly, is it possible to provide scripts / pipelines to generate the images ourselves as some (all?) of the scripts are already shared in this repo? Like a repo that contains a devops pipeline yml that downloads the base image, applies the configuration and uploads it to a private storage where it can be referenced for the scaleset?
The closest I could find was https://github.com/YannickRe/azuredevops-buildagents which however lacks windows-2022 support and (at least in my environment) is not working well.

If this can't be done either: Would a feature request for devops to specify the used VM be an option?
F.e. to specify in the pipeline a specific image where the delta in costs to a standard is billed to devops?
Something like the following:

pool:
  vmImage: 'windows-2022'
  size: 'Standard_B4ms'

BR

[miketimofeev]

@KlausLinzner you can build the image yourself and use it wherever you want. Please follow this guide https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/blob/main/docs/create-image-and-azure-resources.md

[miketimofeev]

I'm afraid it's not that easy to provide yml file as configurations vary among different customers. That's why we provide only the basics

[KlausLinzner]

But please don't get me wrong:
You are able to provide one image for all customers worldwide;
You manage the infrastructure and know of the internals inside out.
If it's not that easy for you - it's nearly impossible for us.

And keep in mind: it's an huge task given to us so we can have f.e. 30 instead of 10GB disc space.

Does it make sense to discuss this with our MS Sales rep? Can we raise a feature request somewhere?

[miketimofeev]

Not sure about feature request as we only provide the scripts to build the images.
You can take a look at our pipelines, which are public here https://github.visualstudio.com/virtual-environments/_build
Yml files are also open-sourced and can be found here https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/tree/main/images.CI/linux-and-win/azure-pipelines as well as the scripts used in them https://github.com/actions/virtual-environments/tree/main/images.CI/linux-and-win

[Mikebeem]

Are those pipelines no longer public? I'm getting: 401 - Uh-oh, you do not have access.
https://github.visualstudio.com/virtual-environments/_build

[miketimofeev]

@Mikebeem with the renaming of the main repo the project has also changed its name to https://github.visualstudio.com/runner-images/_build
Sorry for the inconvenience.

[samus-aran]

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