Limit Simultaneous Azure Pipelines Stage - azure-devops

Question

I have an Azure DevOps Multi Stage Pipeline with multiple agents. Generally my stages consist of:
Build and Publish Artifacts
Deploy to environment 1
UI Test environment 1
Deploy to environment 2
UI Test environment 2
and so on for several environments. How do I allow simultaneous pipelines runs (e.g. Building and Publishing Artifacts for Build #2 while simultaneously UI Testing environment 2 for Build #1), while ensuring that no two agents will ever perform a UI Test for a given environment at the same time?
trigger: batch seems close to what I want, but I believe that disallows concurrency at the pipeline level, not at the stage level.

Answer 1

Your
UI Test environment 1 stage (specifically deployment job which Runs the tests) should target
env1uitest environment.
UI Test environment 2 stage (specifically deployment job which Runs the tests) should target
env2uitest environment.
Then set a exclusive lock ( https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/release-notes/2020/pipelines/sprint-172-update#exclusive-deployment-lock-policy) policy on these two environments.
It should address your need:
"ensuring that no two agents will ever perform a UI Test for a given environment at the same time"
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/process/approvals?view=azure-devops&tabs=check-pass#exclusive-lock

Answer 2

It seems that if somebody runs the release pipeline twice, You need it to run it one by one, not in parallel, right?
As a workaround:
Each release will start from stage 1. Thus we can add a PowerShell task as the first task for stage 1 to check if there are previous in-progress deployments.
In this PowerShell task, we can call this Rest API to check release stage status.
Power shell script:
# Base64-encodes the Personal Access Token (PAT) appropriately
$token = "$(pat)"
$base64AuthInfo= [System.Convert]::ToBase64String([System.Text.Encoding]::ASCII.GetBytes(":$($connectionToken)"))
$success = $false
$count = 0
do{
try{
$stageurl2 = "https://vsrm.dev.azure.com/{org name}/{project name}/_apis/release/deployments?definitionId={release definition ID}&deploymentStatus=inProgress&api-version=6.0"
$stageinfo2 = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -ContentType application/json -Uri $stageurl2 -Headers #{Authorization=("Basic {0}" -f $base64AuthInfo)}
$inprogressdeployments = $stageinfo2.value | where {($_.deploymentStatus -eq "inProgress") -and ($_.release.name -ne $ENV:RELEASE_RELEASENAME) -and ($_.releaseEnvironment.name -ne 'stop services')} | Sort-Object -Property completedOn -Descending
#write-output $inprogressdeployments
$stageurl3 = "https://vsrm.dev.azure.com/{org name}/{project name}/_apis/release/deployments?definitionId={release definition ID}&operationStatus=QueuedForAgent&api-version=6.0"
$stageinfo3 = Invoke-RestMethod -Method Get -ContentType application/json -Uri $stageurl3 -Headers #{Authorization=("Basic {0}" -f $base64AuthInfo)}
$queueddeployments = $stageinfo3.value
#write-output $queueddeployments
if($inprogressdeployments) {
Write-output "Deployment In Progress, Waiting for it to finish!"
Write-output "Next attempt in 30 seconds"
Start-sleep -Seconds 30
} else {
Write-Host "No Current Deployment in Progress"
if($queueddeployments) {
write-output "Current Queued deployments"
Write-output "if 2 - Next attempt in 30 seconds"
Start-sleep -Seconds 30
}
else{
write-output "No Queued deployments, starting release"
$success = $true
}
}
}
catch{
Write-output "catch - Next attempt in 30 seconds"
write-output "1"
Start-sleep -Seconds 30
# Put the start-sleep in the catch statemtnt so we
# don't sleep if the condition is true and waste time
}
$count++
}until($count -eq 2000 -or $success)
if(-not($success)){exit}
Result:
Stage1 will continue to check until all previous versions are complete.
We could also try it with demands, we could specify same demands. Use demands to make sure that the capabilities your pipeline needs are present on the agents that run it. It won't run unless one or more demands are met by the agent.

Answer 3

You put the tasks into different jobs, and specify a dependsOn property for jobs that need to wait for particular job to be finished.
If you leave out the dependsOn, it will run synchronounsly.
After reading your prompt more closely, I think you just need a build stage that builds and publishes your artifact.
then a deploy_test stage for each environment. Stages run sequentially by default (unlike jobs)