Azure DevOps on-premise costs

Question

Seems strange asking this on SO but that's what MS want us to do so here goes...

I'm looking at setting up an on-premise Azure DevOps 2019 server, but as usual the licensing and costs aren't very transparent.

Our dev team are likely to be getting Visual Studio Pro subscriptions, which I believe comes with a DevOps server license and CALs. What happens if we stop these subscriptions - does it mean we can no longer use our on-premise DevOps server?

I'm not very clear on what "extras" we may need to pay for (extensions, pipelines), and I don't want to be hit by any surprises. The essential requirements are:

• Be able to trigger a build on check-in. I can't tell if this is a built-in feature or requires some kind of extension and/or pipeline (and if so free or not?)
• Use build tasks to create NuGet packages and host these on the in-house server. Again, does this require any paid extensions or pipelines?
• There should be no limits on monthly build time (unlike VSTS which I believe is 240 minutes)

Answer 1

To my best understanding:

You can run Azure DevOps Server 2019 with at least one Visual Studio Professional or Enterprise license.

The features available to each user are based on the licence assigned to the user: Stakeholders (no license) get the very basics, Basic access (Professional) gives you most of the features, Enterprise gives you all the features.

The most notable differences between Basic and Enterprise are:

• View Releases and Manage Approvals
• Artifacts Microsoft published
• Azure DevOps Extensions

However, per this annoucement, Artifacts are now included in the Basic/professional license.

So with only professional licenses you should be good for triggering builds, publishing and using nuget-packages via Artifact feeds. I'd think that installing extensions might require Enterprise user and haven't tested "View Releases and Manage Approvals" without Enterprise license yet. That seems to have changed from older TFS we've been using, in which Basic users were able to create and view releases.

So would recommend getting at least one Enterprise license, in any case.