Often when trying to deploy to a group of machines, at least one of the machines in the group will fail for one reason or another (offline, application in use, etc..)
Is there a way to selectively deploy to a specific machine in a Deployment group, without putting each machine in its own group?
You can add a tag to a machine on the depoyment group configuration.
After that, specify the tag at the release deployment group phase.
This will make the release to choose all machine within the group deployment that match you tag.
You can filter machines through tags:
Related
I have multiple local on-prem agents that can run a particular deployment group job (for the purpose of load balancing). I want only the first available one to run the job and not all of them. Which setting of the Deployment Group Job I can use to do that? My only options seems to be "Multiple" and "Single at a time" both of which run the jobs on all servers matching the Required Tags.
I want only the first available one to run the job and not all of them. Which setting of the Deployment Group Job I can use to do that?
There is an option for the Release pipeline with Deployment Group job Required tags：
Then we just need to add the tag to the machine, which we want to deploy:
Now, the release pipeline will run a Deployment Group Job in one of the matching servers.
Update:
I do have the required tag, but on two agent servers. I want the Job
to pick only one of the two matching servers and run the job on it
instead of running it on both.
As workaround, you could create a private agent pool and add two or more agents in it. Those agents are deployed on different machines. With this way, the pipeline will executed on one of the agent.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/pipelines/agents/v2-windows?view=azure-devops&viewFallbackFrom=vsts
We currently have 4 Azure DevOps team projects that require two Deployment Groups to be created for their SIT and UAT release pipelines. All 4 team projects will share the two Deployment Groups, the idea being to create the deployment group from one team project and then sharing or extending it to the other 3 (which I believe is common practice).
My main concern though is that due to some budget constraints, the decision has been taken to create both SIT and UAT Deployment Groups on a single target server. Much as I strongly believe this is probably not best practice, are there any technical reasons why this cannot or shouldn't be implemented?
In simple terms, deployment groups is that:
A deployment group is a logical set of deployment target machines that
have agents installed on each one. Deployment groups represent the
physical environments; for example, "Dev", "Test", "UAT", and
"Production". In effect, a deployment group is just another grouping
of agents, much like an agent pool.
We support registering the same machine to multiple deployment groups. However you would need to edit the agent name in our PS "registration script" provided in the UI. Or log into the machine physically and execute the script in a different folder than the default one specified in the script.
Normally, we set up deployment groups with multiple agents and run deployment just to target agent according to requirements.
What you can do is assign tags to deployment agents and use tags to assign releases to specific agents.
In summary, it's able to register the same machine/server to multiple deployment groups if you insist on.
But due to server performance, environmental isolation , Disaster Tolerance and other factors.
My project is Windows Service application which could be installed in several roles (the difference is in service name, exe path and some setting in app.config). Each role could be scaled horizontally by instances count. And all these {roles x replica counts} should be deployed over a set of servers in specific proportions for effective performance and utilization.
As an example:
ServerA
ServiceAlfa.1
ServiceAlfa.2
ServiceBravo
ServiceDelta
ServerB
ServiceBravo
ServiceCharlie
ServiceDelta.1
ServiceDelta.2
ServiceDelta.3
How can I achieve this with Azure DevOps (Dev17.M153.5) instruments?
I know brand new yaml pipeline introduces some conception of Environments and VM. It's just not available in latest stable version yet. But it's like a replacement for Deployment Groups early used for deployment to multiple machines, which I can use. I have already installed deployment agents and registered it. But I still cannot figure it out how better configure my complex mapping of instances to servers in release pipeline.
I can create a one job stage per role and link them with corresponding variable groups like
StageAlfa
ServerA:2
StageBravo
ServerA:1
ServerB:1
StageCharlie
ServerB:1
StageDelta
ServerA:1
ServerB:3
So I should check and compare the server name in my script
Or I can do the opposite: create a stage per machine and link it with variable group describing count of specific role replicas on current server. So in every stage I could select specific machine from deployment group by tag.
Looks like the second approach is simpler but they both are felt so awkward!
P.S. Windows Services on Machines not a containers in Kubernetes due to specific Windows software dependencies.
Your approaches are correct. You may consider migrating to Azure DevOps Service or upgrade to Azure DevOps Server 2020, which supports Envorinments and VM:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/devops/server/release-notes/azuredevops2020?view=azure-devops#continuous-deployment-in-yaml
Can deployment groups be searched for a particular machine? I need a way to find if a server is already part of a deployment group. I can't tell from the group names if they are applicable to the project.
You could use the REST API for Deployment Groups and look in the Machines property.
Or, if you have access, you can open the deployment groups navigation and look at the targets.
You may want to employ a more robust implementation of tags for the machines in your deployment groups, so you know you'll only deploy to machines in the group that are applicable.
You could simply use Rest API to list all deployment groups in a specific team project.
GET https://dev.azure.com/fabrikam/{project}/_apis/distributedtask/deploymentgroups?api-version=5.0-preview.1
Conversely, it's not able to list all target groups for a special machine at present.
As a workaround, you can add a tag to a machine on the depoyment group configuration.
After that, specify the tag at the release deployment group phase.
This will make the release to choose all machine within the group deployment that match you tag.
We would like to try building a release pipeline for our product in VSTS - however, our product requires a separate instance of the application per customer (there are some legacy in the picture here :)). What we THINK we want, is a process like this:
For each customer:
Update DB schema
Configure a container, with customer-specific configuration etc.
Publish the container into Azure Container Registry
Deploy the container in Azure Container Service (OR on-prem if the customer runs on-prem)
The configuration can be multiple things: Extensions of the API in the application (new DLLs basically), connection strings, ...
I figure we can do this fairly easily using a custom PowerShell script, but I would like to not write anything custom (at least for the "looping" issue) if I don't have to. We could also create separate environments in VSTS for each customer, but that seems quite unmaintainable with well over 100 customers.
Some additional details:
- There's a separate DB per customer
- There's two separate web applications per customer
So what's the best practice here? Any advice? Thanks! :-)
You could think of doing it in two ways.
1 - By creating one environment for each customer. So you could have the exact same tasks for each environment, or have the flexibility to change steps in a particular environment.
This approach would give you also the ability to use a flow pipeline, because your build will be released only after is passes your internal QA and other processes.
To do it easily, you could also create task groups to reuse then in each environment.
2 - The other way is to create create separate releases for each customer or group of customers. This will also give you the same flexibility, you can use your builds, but you have to add some extra steps to make sure you are using the right build, since you can choose any build when you create a release, which you can do mannualy.
Updated
A third option could be to create on environment for all customers and then have the one deployment agent installed for every customer, using all of them on the same deployment group. Then have one file with all your variables per customer, with the file named with the agent name, and a powershell script that uses the agent name variable to find what file to run. This powershell script would then run all your individual configurations.
In that case, I suspect that you would end up doing almost all your deployment in powershell, which could be more time consuming for you to maintain. You also have to keep in mind that in this particular scenario you would update all your customers the same time, because all agents would be on the same deployment group.