How to resolve "No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted" in free tier?

Question

Hello,

I've just started with Azure DevOps pipelines and just created a very simple pipeline with a Maven task. I don't care for parallelism and I'm not sure in which way I've added it to my pipeline. Is there any way to use the Maven task on the free tier without parallelism?

This is my pipeline:

trigger:
- master

pool:
  vmImage: ubuntu-latest

steps:
- task: Maven@3

Thanks

Answer 1

Hello all

I found the next in Microsoft documentation.

I hope this helps anyone else. "Azure Pipelines has temporarily disabled the automatic free grant of Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs in new organizations for public projects and for certain private projects. If you don't have any parallel jobs, your pipelines will fail with the following error: ##[error]No hosted parallelism has been purchased or granted. To request a free parallelism grant, please fill out the following form https://aka.ms/azpipelines-parallelism-request. Check your Microsoft-hosted parallel jobs as described in the following section, and if you have zero parallel jobs, you can request a free grant of parallel jobs. To request the free grant of parallel jobs for your organization, submit a request. Please allow 2-3 business days to respond to your grant request."

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/troubleshooting/troubleshoot-start?view=azure-devops#check-for-available-parallel-jobs

Answer 2

Still having the same problem in june 2023 trying to follow through MS learn for AZ400. Why bother having us do all that work only to have the pipelines fail due to no parallelism. Massive waste of time, clearly should have chosen AWS devops instead.

Answer 3

Submitted the form.

We're using this for business purpose over here. Terraform deployment / Host Pools specifically with our software on them for development (for 3 people), as we weren't too satisfied with Windows 365 performance, and had to move to AVD on NV6/NV14 for Game Development. Not the greatest week I'm now having at my studio...

Here's to hoping nefarious end-users quit while they're ahead. Sorry that you guys got such a headache.

For more information about this restriction, see this announcement: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/change-in-azure-pipelines-grant-for-private-projects/

This action is a preventative measure due to some bad actors. You must request access, and be patient. Bad Apples have spoiled the bunch in this specific case. Edit: Microsoft responded within moments! You must connect your subscription in Azure from your Tenant and set your cost and billing plan up. Ours was approved for pro rated, so it was not a problem. if you encounter this error, please connect your Azure subscription. Your subscription must have a budget and cost plan set up soundly, and a payment method connected to be approved for the free 1800 minutes, and your global administrator (Owner) account should be populated well enough for them to identify. It helped us get approved 15 minutes after I posted this. Thank you for a very fast response!

Answer 4

@Mika Riekkinen Thank you for sharing about the Self-hosted Agent option.

I also hit the security snags you mentioned on Catalina. But they went away after I re-extracted the .tgz with this crucial step just before:

Clear the extended attribute on the tar file: xattr -c vsts-agent-osx-x64-V.v.v.tar.gz.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/v2-osx?view=azure-devops#azure-pipelines

Answer 5

While not a perfect solution, this can be implemented by having a Self-hosted Agent.

1. Project settings -> Agent pools
2. Create new Agent pool, say "local"
3. Add a new Agent and follow the instructions. This includes downloading the binaries and configuring the Agent.
4. Start the agent by running run.sh (or run.bat?)
5. Make your pipeline use the new Agent pool

Last step can be done like this:

pool:  
  name: local 

trigger: none 

steps: 
- script: echo Hello, world! 
  displayName: 'Run a one-line script' 

For me this is enough, I can do some testing and learning the syntax and that kind of things.

For macOS Monterey, this was a bit nasty to setup, as the MacOS security did not allow
the installer run properly. I had to allow each dll one by one in System Preferences -> Security.
Also, I had to restart the install.sh and run.sh multiple times during installation. But once security
is good, this provides exactly what I need.