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
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.
I am using Azure DevOps Server 2020 and I have a release pipeline which has around 21 copy file tasks in it to copy the output of multiple microservices to different target paths and this takes almost around 23 mins to complete the release pipeline.
I want to optimize the release pipeline and save some time and thus I am thinking of running all the copy task simultaneously.
Under the copy tasks in Control Options section, I see Run this task option is available where we do have the option to define custom conditions but I am not sure which custom conditions do I need to define exactly so that all my copy tasks gets executed parallelly.
Could anyone please let me know what custom conditions will allow all the copy task to get executed in one go?
Currently it is not possible to have tasks run in parallel. It has been raised as a suggestion here but the feature hasn't been implemented
How to run multiple Copy Files task in a Azure DevOps Release pipeline simultaneously with Custom Conditions?
Just as TheWinterCoder pointed, Currently it is not possible to have tasks run in parallel.
But, as a workaround, you could divide the replication task into several different jobs and make the jobs run in parallel:
This requires you to have multiple agents available in the local agent pool:
I have a release pipeline composed of several stages
The tfs server have only one worker.
When i start a release, the worker run stages randomly.
The problem is : if someone else start another pipeline, sometimes the worker take the other pipeline before getting back to the next stage.
Is there a way to lock the worker on the entire release pipeline ?
When running a pipeline, a job is the unit of scale. This means each job can potentially run on a different agent.
Each job runs on an agent. A job represents an execution boundary of a set of steps. All of the steps run together on the same agent.
Next to that,
A stage is a logical boundary in the pipeline. It can be used to mark separation of concerns (for example, Build, QA, and production).
More information: Azure Pipelines - Key concepts.
You should also have a look at the Pipeline run sequence. It clearly explains how the entire pipeline-process works.
Whenever Azure Pipelines needs to run a job, it will ask the pool for an agent.
If the availability of the agent is the issue, you might want to add more agents to the pool. If needed, you can even run multiple agents on the same machine.
Although multiple agents can be installed per machine, we strongly suggest to only install one agent per machine. Installing two or more agents may adversely affect performance and the result of your pipelines.
What are the differences between an Agent Job and a Deployment Group Job in Azure DevOps? What are the reason to create one or the other?
What are the differences between an Agent Job and a Deployment Group
Job in Azure DevOps?
Agent job:
Run steps on an agent which in an agent pool.
Deployment group jobs:
Run on machines in a deployment group.
These are the definition of them. You can see that, the fundamental difference between them is that the target when running the job are different.
For agent job, it can only run on one target at a time (unless set up parallel to run on multiple targets at a time, but parallel is essentially multiple jobs). And deployment group job is, since the deployment group is multiple machines are bound in a group, it can run a job on multiple machines at a time.
In the usage scenario, Agent job can used in both Build and Release pipeline. But for Deployment agent job, it can only be used in Release pipeline for application/project deploy.
What are the reason to create one or the other?
In build pipeline, it should no doubt that you can only use Agent job (or Agentless) job.
I think what you concerned should be the usage in Release pipeline. As I mentioned above, these different jobs can all be used in Release pipeline, and they can all be used for project deployed.
But in terms of specific use, it depends on the task you will use and the number of target servers you want to deploy to.
Agent job:
If your deployment target server number less than 5 objects, and need to deploy to multiple machines at the same time, you can set up a parallel job for Agent job. The Agent job may take a little longer time than Deployment group job. But because the number of deployed targets is not too much, the difference is not obvious.
Deployment group job:
For medium and large companies, the Deployment target objects are generally more than 10, even 100. It is most appropriate to use Deployment group job, because it can be deployed on different machines in one job.
In release, recommend you use Deployment group job if you have multiple targets to deploy to:
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.