To ensure our hosted agents in Azure Pipelines are operating in the most secure and up-to-date environments, we continuously update the supported images and phase out older ones. In October 2024, we announced support for Ubuntu-24.04. Soon, we plan to update the ubuntu-latest image to map to Ubuntu-24.04. Additionally, MacOS 15 Sequoia and Windows 2025 images will be generally available later this year. Alongside these new releases, we will deprecate older images like Ubuntu-20.04 and Windows Server 2019. Please refer to the following subsections for detailed updates on individual images.
Ubuntu
Ubuntu 24.04
General Availability of Ubuntu 24.04
The Ubuntu-24.04 Pipelines image is available since October last year. We plan to update the ubuntu-latest image to map to Ubuntu-24.04 soon. After this change all the jobs using ubuntu-latest image will run on ubuntu-24.04 instead of ubuntu-22.04. Please note that some tools are no longer available on the Ubuntu-24.04 image.
Ubuntu 20.04
Deprecation plan for Ubuntu-20.04
We are deprecating support for the Ubuntu 20.04 image in Azure Pipelines because it will reach its end of support soon. Please find the deprecation plan for the same below.
Key Dates:
• Deprecation Start Date: March 19, 2025
• Brownout period: 19th March 2025 to 28th March 2025
• Full Removal Date: April 30th, 2025
What This Means for You:
Starting from March 18, 2025, organization using the Ubuntu 20.04 image will begin to see a banner indicating the upcoming deprecation. To raise awareness about the upcoming deprecation we will temporarily fail the jobs (brownout) that are using Ubuntu 20.04 from March 19th 2025 to April 8th 2025. From April 30, 2025, the Ubuntu 20.04 image will be fully removed from our hosted agents, and any pipelines still using this image will fail to run.
Brownout schedule
19th March 2025: 21:00 – 5:00 UTC
21st March 2025: 5:00 – 13:00 UTC
25th March 2025: 13:00 – 21:00 UTC
26th March 2025: 21:00 – 5:00 UTC
28th March 2025: 5:00 – 13:00 UTC
1st April 2025: 13:00 – 21:00 UTC
8th April 2025: 13:00 – 21:00 UTC
Recommended Actions:
To avoid disruptions, we recommend updating your pipelines to use the Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04 image as soon as possible. The updated Ubuntu images offer improved performance, security, and support for the latest tools and libraries.
How to find out the impacted pipelines
To find out the impacted pipelines that are using the deprecated images please run the script present here.
You can also identify pipelines that are using a deprecated (e.g. ubuntu-20.04) image, by checking the following location: https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/{project}/_settings/agentqueues
Select the ‘Azure Pipelines’ pool, then, filter on the image name, refer the following snapshot.
