Hello!
A few days ago Brian Harry has released some Christmas news with some changes in the licensing model for Visual Studio Online, and also he make some clarification related to the prices of some of the services in VSO.
Some time ago he already announced some important changes, for example StakeHolders will not require to pay a license (I already wrote here about this). And also in the post, Brian Harry remark new changes for various services:
- Release Management
- Test Execution
- Cloud Load Testing
- VS Online Build Service
I want to talk about a little about the last one (because we have a fun talk about this with a colleague at work). Discounting the 60 free minutes we have per month, the basic price for build server is this one:
- $0.05 per minute up to 20 hours
- $0.01 per minute spent 20 hours
If we do a quick math calc, we can create a table with the following values
| Minutes | Daily Builds | Month Working Days | Total Minutes / Month | Mont build Hours | Month Cost |
| 5 | 10 | 20 | 1000 | 16.67 | $50.00 |
| 5 | 20 | 20 | 2000 | 33.33 | $20.00 |
| 5 | 50 | 20 | 5000 | 83.33 | $50.00 |
| 5 | 100 | 20 | 10000 | 166,67 | $100.00 |
| 10 | 10 | 20 | 2000 | 33.33 | $20.00 |
| 10 | 20 | 20 | 4000 | 66,67 | $40.00 |
| 10 | 50 | 20 | 10000 | 166,67 | $100.00 |
| 10 | 100 | 20 | 20000 | 333,33 | $200.00 |
The premise in these numbers is the time that takes each build (1st col), the number of builds that we launched a day (2nd column) and the days of work per month (3rd column). This is completely relative to each team, since if you have a continuous CI process, a team of 20 people and beams of checkins 30 half a day, then the numbers will be others.
Returning to exercise builds and price, if we do a quick analysis of the price list, the first thing that strikes us is that, with exceptions, really you should spend 20 hours per month. For example, having a build that average takes 5 minutes, spent the same to launch 10 daily builds to build 50 daily.
In the same way, we see to throw 100 daily builds of 5 minutes each, gives about $100 a month. If you really know the value that gives you an integration scenario, you will see that this is very cheap. (would certainly 100 daily builds, in a team of 5 people are 20 builds a day, or in continuous integration are 20 daily checkins, enough or almost, if?)
I won’t go into detail of scenarios more complex, where a build also compile and run tests, also generate packages, deployment packages, run tests automation, etc. I think this kind of compilations are not which run on a CI environment, though no shortage of exceptions and it will be necessary to adjust prices to the model requiring each team.
Greetings @ Madrid
/El Bruno
Source: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/bharry/archive/2014/12/10/more-pricing-and-licensing-changes-coming.aspx
El Bruno 