I am having one windows self hosted agent for Azure DevOps pipeline. If we run two pipelines, one has to wait for the other to be completed. Is there any way to do parallelly run the pipelines by doing any configuration in agent?
Check this doc(Self-hosted agent):
For public projects that are self-hosted, you can have unlimited parallel jobs running. For private projects, you can have one job and one additional job for each active Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber who is a member of your organization.
Is there any way to do parallelly run the pipelines
If you are using public project, the number of parallel jobs is Unlimited, if you are using private, the default number of parallel job is one self-hosted job. We need to buy self-hosted parallel jobs, then we could run the pipeline in parallel.
In addition, we could open Organization Settings->Parallel jobs to check the number of parallel jobs, check the pic below:
Buy self-hosted parallel jobs steps:
Open Organization Settings->Billing->set up Billing and buy self-hosted parallel jobs. Check the pic below:
Result:
Note: we need to install another self-hosted agent and then we can run two pipelines at the same time.
Update1
Install another agent, we could install it in the same agent pool or create other agent pools and install the new agent.
Steps:
Open org settings->agent pool->open default agent pool and click the button New agent to download self-hosted agent zip.file->install another agent with the file and enter another agent name, click the pic below.
If you buy more parallel executions you can do that. All you need to do is install another azure devops agent service on the same box and register it.
Related
I am using Windows Self hosted agent for my Azure DevOps pipelines. Currently the pipelines are executed sequentially. If more than one pipelines triggered from different ADO projects, then it has to wait in queue to get the agent. In order to execute the pipeline in parallel, I came to know from some tutorials if we increase the paid parallel jobs for self hosted agent under billing section of Organization setting. Is my understanding correct? If so what are the precautionary steps I need to take. Do we have any control of when the pipelines to be executed in parallel?
Thanks.
In order to run self-hosted parallel jobs, you need to purchase parallel jobs and register several self-hosted agents.
For parallel jobs, you can register any number of self-hosted agents in your organization. If you want to run 3 jobs in parallel, then you must register at least 3 self-hosted agents in one agent pool. DevOps charges based on the number of jobs you want to run at a time, not the number of agents registered. There are no time limits on self-hosted jobs. For private projects, you can have one job and one additional job for each active Visual Studio Enterprise subscriber who is a member of your organization.
About how to purchase parallel jobs, please refer to Buy parallel jobs.
For how to control the use of parallel jobs, please refer to the following:
For classic pipeline, you can specify when to run the job through dependencies and Run this job in Additional options in the agent job. Then the pipeline will run in sequence according to your settings.
For YAML pipeline, you can specify the conditions under which the job should run with "dependsOn" and "condition".
For example:
For more info about conditions, please refer to Specify conditions
If you don't specify a specific order, the jobs will run in parallel based on the parallel jobs you purchased.
I don't know if my experience can help. I'll try. I started a new job and we use self-hosted TFS / Azure DevOps. I am changing our build process to create 3 product SKUs (it uses conditional compilation). Let's call them Good, Better & Best.
I edited the Build definition. First I switched to the Variables tab. I created a Process variable named SKUs and set it to Good,Better,Best. The commas are important.
Next I switched to the Tasks tab. I located the Agent Phase. Mine was called Phase 1. Select it. On the right, under Parallelism, I selected Multi-configuration. In the Multipliers text field I entered SKUs. I set Maximum number of agents to 3.
What I don't yet know is the TFS back-end administration and options that the company purchased beforehand.
We have deployed self-hosted agents on Docker Image managed by Azure Container Images. We run release jobs parallelly and hence want to restrict the use of 1 agent for 1 job. The agent should either restart or delete after completion
In the release pipeline, you can set Demand for the job to specify a specific agent to run.
Demands: Specify which capabilities the agent must have to run this pipeline.
Or you can add an additional job, use the hosted agent to run the job, add a powershell task to this job, and delete the self-hosted agent that has finished running the job by calling the Agents-Delete rest api
DELETE https://dev.azure.com/{organization}/_apis/distributedtask/pools/{poolId}/agents/{agentId}?api-version=6.0
We have deployed Azure devops Self-hosted Agent in our own agentpool.
We have also purchased 4 parallel job per agent , but when our build runs, it runs only one job at a time and other pipeline/release jobs have to wait.
How can we run 4 parallel pipeline/release jobs ?
How can we run 4 parallel pipeline/release jobs ?
According to your screenshot, you seem to only register one self-hosted agent, and running a parallel job will consume one agent, so if you want to run 4 jobs in parallel, you need to register at least 4 self-hosted agents.
Running parallel jobs on the same agent can be achieved by container jobs
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/container-phases?view=azure-devops-2019#multiple-jobs-with-agent-pools-on-a-single-hosted-agent
There is a small gotcha around being logged out when multiple jobs are running at the same time and a Docker workaround suggested here
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/container-phases?view=azure-devops-2019#multiple-jobs-with-agent-pools-on-a-single-hosted-agent
I have a build with multiple jobs, where they depend on each other's output. But I also have multiple agents, which gives me the following issue:
If Agent1 runs Job1, Agent2 runs Job2, and Job3 requires the output from both Job1 and Job2, I can't access the files from just one agent, since they are located on different machines.
How do I make my jobs able to download the output of other agents?
I looked for the workspace on MS Docs, but it doesn't describe how to handle this scenario.
To add more details on top of JukkaK's answer.
I looked for the workspace on MS Docs, but it doesn't describe how to
handle this scenario.
The workspace is something corresponding to agents. No sure which kind of agent do you use, but different agents have different OS instance, so the content under same path(workspace) in one agent should be quite different from that in another agent.
So workspace is not the approach for you needs.
How do I make my jobs able to download the output of other agents?
You can use Publish Artifacts+Download Artifacts combination to do what you need. See this:
You can place Publish build Artifacts task as the last task of agent job1 and job2. Then add a Download buil Artifacts as the first one of agent job3.
And make sure agent job3 depends on agent job1 and job2 like this:
In this way, the output from agent job1 and job2 can be installed in agent job3's machine for further usage. Hope it helps.
Pipeline artifacts in multi-stage pipelines would be a perfect match for this, if the current features available with multi-stage pipelines otherwise satisfy your needs.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/artifacts/pipeline-artifacts?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml
If not, the best I can come up with is directing the the jobs to same agent by adding a capability to agent and adding a demand to the pool-assignment (or by creating your own pool). With Deployment group agents, adding tags is a handy way to direct jobs to a certain agent in deployment group, but haven't found anything similar on build agents.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/demands?view=azure-devops&tabs=yaml
I have installed agent on VM and configured a CI build pipeline. The pipeline is triggered and works perfectly fine.
Now I want to use same build pipeline, same agent, but different VM. Is this possible?
How will the execution happen for builds and on which VM will the source be copied?
Thank you.
Like the others I'm also not sure what you're trying to do and also think that the same agent across multiple machines is not possible.
But if you have to alternate or choose easily between VMs, you could set up for each of your VMs (used for this special scenario) an individual agent queue with one agent in that pool. That way you can choose the agent pool at queue time via the agent queue dropdown field. But that would only work if you're triggering manually, not in a typical CI scenario. In that case you would have to edit the definition to enforce any particular VM each time you want to swap VMs.
NO. These private agents are supposed to have a unique name and are assigned to an Agent Pool/Queue. They are polling up to VSTS/Azure Devops server if they have a job to do. Then they execute it. If you clone a machine with the same private build agent, then theoretically the agent that picks it up will execute the job, but that is theoretic. I really don't know how the Agent Queues will handle this.
It depends on what you want to do.
If you want to spread the workload, like 2 build servers and have builds go to whichever build server isn't busy, then you would create 1 Agent Pool/Queue. Create a Private Agent on one server and register it to that Pool, then on the second server un-register the agent and then re-register the agent add it to the SAME pool.
If you want to do work on 2 servers at the exact same time, like a deployment to 2 servers at the same time, then you would create a 'Deployment Group' and add both servers to that. You would unregister both agents from the Agent Pool/Queue. From your 'Deployment Group' copy the PowerShell script snippet and run it on each machine. This way you can use this in your Release Pipeline and deployments in parallel, which take less time to do deployments.
You could set up a variable in the pipeline so you can specify the name of the VM at build-time.
Also, once you have one or more agents, you would add them to an app pool. When builds are run, it will choose one agent from the pool and use that.