Azure Sponsored Subscription 2026: utilizes the 100k$ credits for the Jenkins Infrastructure

[dduportal]

This issue is an EPIC (e.g. "top level") issue to track the actions and decisions about using the 100k$ Azure credits issued for the Jenkins infrastructure.

Many thanks @NotMyFault @lemeurherve @MarkEWaite for working on getting and setting up these credits in our Azure account.

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How to use the credits: New subscription named Jenkins sponsored with id 1e7d5219-acbc-4495-8629-bdbb22e9b3ed

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(wip)

• First wave of tasks (quick and easy): moving the following ephemeral workloads to the new subscription for:
  • cert.ci.jenkins.io Azure VM agents (see Azure Sponsored Subscription 2026: utilizes the 100k$ credits for the Jenkins Infrastructure #5003 (comment) for costs gains)
  • trusted.ci.jenkins.io Azure VM agents (see Azure Sponsored Subscription 2026: utilizes the 100k$ credits for the Jenkins Infrastructure #5003 (comment) for costs gains)
  • infra.ci.jenkins.io Azure VM agents (see Azure Sponsored Subscription 2026: utilizes the 100k$ credits for the Jenkins Infrastructure #5003 (comment) for costs gains)
  • packer builds (includes the azure image libraries) (see Azure Sponsored Subscription 2026: utilizes the 100k$ credits for the Jenkins Infrastructure #5003 (comment) for costs gains)
• Second wave of tasks (requires a bit more of efforts): moving the following workloads to the new subscription for:
  • packer image templates (see Azure Sponsored Subscription 2026: utilizes the 100k$ credits for the Jenkins Infrastructure #5003 (comment) for costs gains)
  • infra.ci.jenkins.io container agents (AKS cluster)
  • ACR registry
  • puppet.jenkins.io VM
• Third wave of tasks (requires quite the effort):
  • trusted.ci.jenkins.io permanent agent
  • trusted.ci.jenkins.io and cert.ci.jenkins.io controller VMs

[timja]

I can't see that subscription. Could the administrators group be added to it please?

[dduportal]

I can't see that subscription. Could the administrators group be added to it please?

Yes, let us write down things and plan it, I just started the issue placeholder :D

[dduportal]

I can't see that subscription. Could the administrators group be added to it please?

#5005

[dduportal]

A few order of magnitudes in cost:

• The Azure VM ephemeral agents for infra.ci, cert.ci and trusted.ci costed us ~$4,000 in the past 6.5 months, immediate gain of ~$615 monthly on Azure CDF:
  • Note: cert.ci as a peak of cost usage once every quarter, due to roughly one major / Core security advisory per quarter. It's the higher cost usage.
  • trusted.ci is the second one, with a relatively constant usage
  • infra.ci as lower and also relatively constant usage but it's still a quick win

• Then, the Packer VM usage, which is lower than I would have thought (good!) but still quick and easy (at least the builds) to move to sponsored subscription:
  • ~$675 for the builds on the past 6 months, e.g. ~$112 monthly
  • ~$522 for the VM image storage on the past 6 months, e.g. ~$87 monthly

[dduportal]

Another round of costs:

• trusted.ci.jenkins.io (all):
  • The outbound bandwidth (mainly to archives.jenkins.io, Artifactory and DockerHub) costs us ~$400 monthly. Will be interesting to measure the "split" between ephemeral agents (DockerHub, crawler, jenkins.io, RPU, etc.) and permanent agent (update center to archives.jio and cloudflare) after moving the ephemeral to sponsored subscription (or by using 2 different network gateway for both)
  • The permanent agent has the same order of cost (~$400 monthly) due to its persistent disk (with all the Update Center cache) which makes it a good candidate to move to the sponsored subscription

(wip)