Describe Azure Pipelines and open-source projects

  • 6 minutes

Azure DevOps provides powerful DevOps capabilities including source control, planning, builds, releases, and testing. While these features typically require user authentication, public projects enable broader community collaboration.

Public vs private projects

Public projects allow anonymous users to:

  • View source code, commits, branches, and pull requests
  • Browse work items and project dashboards
  • Access project wikis
  • Search code and work items (read-only access)

Private projects require:

  • User authentication and project access permissions
  • Signed-in users to access any services

Open-source benefits

Public projects are ideal for open-source development. Consider this scenario:

Before public projects: A popular open-source library has build badges in their README, but clicking them shows "access denied" unless you're a project maintainer.

With public projects: Anyone can view build results, understand failures, and contribute fixes through pull requests.

This transparency helps community members:

  • Debug build issues
  • Contribute improvements
  • Understand project health
  • Learn from CI/CD practices

Free tier eligibility for public projects

You automatically qualify for free Azure Pipelines parallel jobs for public projects when:

  • Your pipeline runs in an Azure DevOps public project
  • Your pipeline builds a public repository (GitHub or Azure DevOps)

Free tier includes:

  • Public projects: 10 parallel jobs for Microsoft-hosted agents (unlimited minutes)
  • Private projects: 1 parallel job (60 minutes max, 1,800 minutes/month)

Common questions

User limits: Azure Pipelines has no per-user charges. Unlimited users can create builds and releases with basic or stakeholder access.

Pipeline limits: Create unlimited build and release pipelines at no cost. Register unlimited self-hosted agents for free.

Visual Studio Enterprise: Subscribers get one additional self-hosted parallel job per organization.

Pricing: For current pricing and detailed comparisons, visit Azure DevOps Services Pricing.