Self hosting a stable image

[davidaughey]

Greetings everyone!

I have a particular use case that perhaps is already solved or perhaps needs some thought about how it can be facilitated in the source.

TLDR: To work around the 10GB disk space limit on the hosted agents, I'm using the latest release to create private agents but the latest release (win19/20220123.1) can no longer be built. Main is too hot as I've been burned with it before. What can be done to ensure releases can be rebuilt? Or, is it even necessary?

And the long version ...

Are you familiar with the 10GB disk space limit on the data drive for the Windows images? That is basically the root of my problem right there. We're stuck with a monolith and disk space is a bit tight for building the whole thing. Well, I say tight, I really mean it's woefully inadequate. Parts of the monolith are being sheered off for use on the hosted agents but realistically what's left is never going to fit in 10GB so this needs worked around.

The obvious solution is to self host. What I do is create my own image based on the win19 scripts here. I just give it a much larger data drive and we're good. A total win because it also means as we sheer off chunks of the monolith we know they'll work in the hosted agents as they're based on fundamentally the same image.

So, what's the problem? Not being able to use main without being burned and also not being able to trust the releases because they don't lock in the package versions that they install.

After previously being burned from main, I updated my refresh automation to detect the tag that's in use on the 2019 hosted agents and use that source instead. It's live on the hosted agents, so it's stable, right? Guaranteed to not burst into flames.

Unfortunately the latest release (win19/20220123.1) will no longer build because one of the packages it installs is now installing to a different location resulting it failing the tests.

To be fair, this situation doesn't happen very often. Over the last year it's only struck once. So, does it even need to be solved? I can wait a week for the next release assuming the weekly release cadence resumes.

Does anyone else have a need to build the latest release instead of main?