Estimate parallel jobs
Start with the free tier to understand your organization's usage patterns. Each Azure DevOps organization gets free parallel jobs with monthly limits:
- Private projects: 1 parallel job with 60-minute limit and 1,800 minutes per month
- Public projects: 10 parallel jobs for Microsoft-hosted agents (unlimited minutes)
When queues become too long, consider purchasing additional parallel jobs.
Estimation guidelines
Quick estimate: Plan for one parallel job per 4-5 users in your organization.
Detailed analysis - You may need more parallel jobs if you have:
- Multiple teams: Each team doing continuous integration may need dedicated capacity
- Multiple branches: Active branches with CI triggers require separate job slots
- Multiple applications: Simultaneous deployments across different applications
- Complex workflows: Pipelines with multiple stages running in parallel
Checking your current usage
To view your parallel job limits and usage:
- Navigate to Organization settings > Pipelines > Parallel jobs.
- Or visit:
https://{your_organization}/_settings/buildqueue?_a=concurrentJobs. - Select View in-progress jobs to see active and queued jobs.
How parallel jobs are shared
Organization-level resource: Parallel jobs belong to your entire organization, not individual projects.
Shared capacity: All projects compete for the same parallel job pool. For example:
- Organization has 2 parallel jobs
- Project A starts 2 pipelines (uses both slots)
- Project B's pipeline waits until Project A's jobs complete
No partitioning: Currently, you can't dedicate parallel jobs to specific projects or agent pools.