Investigate 1ES hosted pool feature: Image aliases

[riarenas]

New 1ES feature

for pools that have multiple images, you can target the image to use in your pipeline through ImageOverride demand and passing the image name you want. However, this means that whenever you change the pool image, you need to update all your YAML pipelines. For example, the pool image is MyImage1 and the demand in YAML is MyImage1. If you remove MyImage1 and replace it with MyBetterImage, you also need to update the YAML.

Now, you can specify an alias on the pool image (example here) and use that alias in your YAML pipeline.

We should see if we can take advantage of this. Maybe offering something like windows-latest-with-vs, standard ubuntu-latest aliases.

Release Note Category

• [ ] Feature changes/additions
• [ ] Bug fixes
• [ ] Internal Infrastructure Improvements

  Release Note Description

[riarenas]

Internal Teams thread of the announcement

[riarenas]

Considerations need to be taken for release branches so that we don't end up moving forward with major distro versions in older releases that might not support them.