I think this is the interesting comparison. How did a Tier-1 MS-hosted build VM cost? Around 400€? How does it compare to using the Azure DevTest Labs alternative?
There’s only one fix cost when using Azure DevTest Labs: the blob storage where the VHD is uploaded. The VHD’s size is around 130GB and this should have a cost of, more or less, 5 euros/month. Keep in mind that you need to clean up your custom images when yours is prepared, the new ones are created as snapshots and also take space in the storage account.
Then we have the variable costs that come with the deployment of a VM each build but it’s just absurd. Imagine we’re using a B4ms VM, with a 256GB Premium SSD disk, we would pay 0.18€/hour for the VM plus the proportional part of 35.26€/month of the SSD disk, which would be like 5 cents/hour?
But this can run on a B2ms VM too which is half the compute price of the VM, down to 9 cents per hour.
If we run this build once a day each month, 30 times, the cost of a B4ms would be like… 7€? Add the blob storage and we’ll be paying 12€ per month to run our builds with DB sync and tests.
Is it cheaper than deploying a cloud-hosted environment, and starting and stopping it using the new d365fo.tools Cmdlets each time we run the build? Yes it is! Because if we deploy a CHE we’ll be paying the price of the SSD disk for the whole month!
