Last month we covered what had just shipped. This time we’re looking the other direction: what Microsoft’s own roadmap says is landing in August, and what’s queued up behind it.

Two Managed DevOps Pools features due this month

Both of these are explicitly dated for August 2026 on Microsoft’s roadmap, not vague “coming soon” items.

Purge agents. Right now, a Managed DevOps Pools agent lives out its configured lifecycle before it’s recycled. This adds the ability to manually recycle an agent on demand. Useful for the specific, annoying case where an agent has picked up some bad local state, a stuck process, a corrupted cache, and waiting for its natural rotation isn’t good enough.

Custom Startup Script. A PowerShell script (Windows) or shell script (Linux) that runs against every image in a pool before it’s handed to an agent. The headline use cases Microsoft calls out are installing trusted root CAs and setting environment variables, exactly the kind of per-tenant customization that previously meant baking a custom image or repeating setup steps in every pipeline. If you’ve ever added the same “install our internal CA cert” task to a dozen pipelines, this replaces it with one script at the pool level.

What’s further out on the Pipelines roadmap

Microsoft’s broader roadmap lists a couple of Pipelines-area items for Q3 2026 (July through September) without committing to a specific week, so treat these as “watch for it” rather than “expect it in August”:

  • Large hosted agents, for workloads that outgrow the standard Microsoft-hosted agent specs.
  • Control access to GitHub repositories, tightening how Azure Pipelines authorizes against GitHub-hosted source.

Neither is pinned to a date yet. We’ll cover them properly once they actually land.

Reminder: the NTLM deprecation is a month closer

Last month we flagged that libcurl (the library Git uses for HTTPS operations) is dropping NTLM support in September 2026, which breaks Git-over-HTTPS for on-prem Azure DevOps Server customers still authenticating that way. That’s now next month, not “eventually.” If you haven’t already moved affected clients to a Personal Access Token or another supported auth method, August is the month to actually do it rather than the month to keep meaning to.

As always, none of this changes what a working pipeline needs to do day to day, but it’s the kind of thing worth tracking so the pipelines we hand over keep working the way they’re supposed to. If you’d rather someone else track it for you, that’s what a support pack is for, or get in touch if the NTLM change affects an environment you’re running.