Question

Your team runs an Azure DevOps organization where a busy YAML pipeline produces builds every few minutes across many pull request branches. Storage consumption and stale artifacts have grown out of control, and management wants to reduce cost while ensuring that runs pinned by manual retention leases and any run tied to a release are never automatically deleted. You need to configure retention so ordinary PR-triggered runs are cleaned up quickly. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Set the project-level pipeline retention policy to a low 'Days to keep runs' value; runs with manual retention leases or associated with a release are automatically retained beyond the policy.

Answer

Configure the pipeline's YAML file with a 'retention' block specifying daysToKeep, and rely on it to override the project-level retention policy.

Answer

Add a scheduled cleanup pipeline that calls the Azure DevOps REST API to delete every run older than a threshold, including leased and release-linked runs.

Answer

Enable branch policy build validation with a short expiry so that PR builds are deleted when the pull request completes.