Edit

Improvements to strengthen security

  • Article

With this update, we are including improvements to strengthen security in Azure DevOps. Due to these changes, you may experience and interruption of service and may be asked to re-authenticate after a security event to continue using the service.

Check out the release notes for details.

General

Azure Pipelines

General

Improvements to strengthen security in Azure DevOps

Azure DevOps will now respond to upstream security events in Azure AD (e.g., password changes) faster. As a result users may be asked to re-authenticate after a security event to continue using the service. For web flows, users may be prompted to re-authenticate and have to fulfil the required conditional access policies (e.g., Multi-factor auth, IP fencing etc.) as mandated by their company administrators.

Changes to third-party applications access

Perviously, organizations had the "Third-party application access via OAuth" policy enabled by default. Moving forward, this policy will be disabled by default for all new organizations and Project Collection Administrators must explicitly enable this policy. For all existing organizations, the setting will remain the same.

Azure Pipelines

Pipelines Agent runtime upgrade planning

What is the Pipeline Agent?

The Azure DevOps Pipeline Agent is the software product that runs on a pipeline host to execute pipeline jobs. It runs on Microsoft hosted agents, Scale Set agents and Self-hosted agents. In the latter case you install it yourself. The Pipeline Agent consists of a Listener and Worker (implemented in .NET), the Worker runs tasks which are implemented either in Node or PowerShell and therefore hosts those runtimes for them.

Upcoming upgrade to .NET 6 & Red Hat 6 deprecation

With the release of .NET 6 we are able to take advantage of its new cross-platform capabilities. Specifically, we will be able to provide native compatibility for Apple Silicon and Windows Arm64. Hence we plan to move to .NET 6 for Pipeline Agent (Listener and Worker) in the coming months.

Due to a number of constraints that this imposes, we are dropping Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 support from our agent April 30th 2022.

Next steps

Note

These features will roll out over the next two to three weeks.

Head over to Azure DevOps and take a look.

Go to Azure DevOps

How to provide feedback

We would love to hear what you think about these features. Use the help menu to report a problem or provide a suggestion.

Make a suggestion

You can also get advice and your questions answered by the community on Stack Overflow.

Thanks,

Aaron Hallberg