Azure DevOps is an integrated service provided by Azure. In recent times, it is observed that Azure DevOps is increasing its penetration into the DevOps community. Being a SaaS service, it doesn’t come with a pre-configured host or better say, an agent to execute its commands. That’s why whenever we want to use our Azure DevOps Pipeline we need to have an agent configured in our Agent Pool. In this blog, we will learn how to configure an agent and later on how to create a service for our host.
Let’s Get Started
Configuring a self-hosted Agent might seem complicated but by following the below steps we can easily configure an agent in our Agent Pool. So let’s get started.
What is Azure DevOps?
Now, let’s talk about Azure DevOps, it is a mixture of the simplest of technology and therefore the application of best practices. We can say, it is the Next Big Thing in the IT Industry. Azure DevOps is a Software as a service (SaaS) platform from Microsoft that provides an end-to-end DevOps toolchain for developing and deploying software. Microsoft recently launched this as they understand that DevOps has become vital to a team’s success.
Azure Self-hosted Agent
An agent that you set up and manage on your own to run jobs is a self-hosted agent. Though we can use a Microsoft Hosted Agent, we prefer a self-hosted Agent. This is to have more control to install dependent software needed for our builds and deployments, machine-level caches and configuration persist from run to run, boosting speed and maintaining the backup of our logs. You can use self-hosted agents in Azure Pipelines or Azure DevOps Server, formerly named Team Foundation Server (TFS). To successfully configure a self-hosted Agent we need an Agent Pool, download & unzip the package, Personal Access Token (PAT) and execute a few shell commands. Let’s move step by step.
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