News

Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server Pricing, Licensing Updated

Microsoft's new build/test pricing and licensing reductions that were proposed last month are now in effect.

Microsoft now has new build/test pricing and licensing for Visual Studio Online and Team Foundation Server that is significantly reduced. Those changes were expected and previewed in early December in a blog from Microsoft Technical Fellow Brian Harry.

Most significant is the removal of per-processor licensing. "The biggest feedback we've gotten is that, in the modern DevOps, cloud first world, counting processors and VMs simply isn't viable," writes Harry. With the dynamic nature of test environments, the hope is that no longer having to count processors "will make Release Management more affordable" as well as manageable.

Build services are now 5 cents a minute up to 20 hours/month, and then 1 cent for any minutes over 20 hours in the same billable month. Harry writes that teams running a large number of builds can realize a 5x savings when exceeding 20 hours of usage regularly.

As for load testing, test execution capabilities are now available to all VSO users in the test hub. All that's required to run tests is a Basic license. An Advanced license, however, is needed for those who need to manage tests. In similar fashion, test execution rights for those using Team Foundation Server 2015 will be included in the TFS Client Access License (that is, you just need the one CAL to run a test).

Load testing is broken out into three phases: $0.0004 per virtual user minute for 20,001 to 2 million VUM; $0.0002 until 10 million VUMs is reached; then $0.001thereafter. The 20K minute limit is worthwhile to note, as that's an increase of 5K minutes that were available before.

One other highlight is that there is now a 100-user limit for VSO Professional (it was 10).

Those changes were among a number of changes over the course of the last year, including a new Stakeholder licensing scheme that was introduced midyear 2014.

About the Author

You Tell 'Em, Readers: If you've read this far, know that Michael Domingo, Visual Studio Magazine Editor in Chief, is here to serve you, dear readers, and wants to get you the information you so richly deserve. What news, content, topics, issues do you want to see covered in Visual Studio Magazine? He's listening at [email protected].

comments powered by Disqus

Featured

  • Microsoft Ships Stable Versions of OpenAI Libraries for .NET and Azure

    Further leveraging the relationship that vaulted Microsoft and OpenAI into leadership positions in the AI era, Microsoft this week announced stable versions of two new OpenAI libraries.

  • Microsoft Further Embraces OpenAPI Spec (formerly Swagger)

    Microsoft has long embraced the OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as Swagger) for describing APIs, and it's now taking that support to the next level with a new online resource.

  • Get Good at DevOps: Feature Flag Deployments with ASP.NET WebAPI

    They provide developers with the ability to toggle features on and off without having to redeploy code, making it easier to manage risk, test features in production, and facilitate smoother releases.

  • Implementing k-NN Classification Using C#

    Dr. James McCaffrey of Microsoft Research presents a full demo of k-nearest neighbors classification on mixed numeric and categorical data. Compared to other classification techniques, k-NN is easy to implement, supports numeric and categorical predictor variables, and is highly interpretable.

Subscribe on YouTube