I need to create a test deployment. We have 2 identical test agents for load balancing purpose. I add a Windows File Copy, VS Test Agent deployment and Run Functional Tests steps. I copy all the required artifacts (test dlls and test files) to all the agents (1st step), write the two agents names to the 2nd and 3rd steps. And then ...?
Will it select one of the agents for deployment and run or will it deploy and run on each of the agents? In the 1st case will it select the same agent for deployment (2nd step) and for the execution (3rd step)? Then how (what hidden feature will link the 2nd and 3rd steps together? How (on what criteria) will the TFS select the 1st or the 2nd agent? Can the agents work as build agents as well? Will the TFS know if they are working on something or not? Is there any documentation on how TFS 2015 thinks and works on a scenario like this?
Thanks in advance!
Test agents are not the same as build agents.
You push the binaries to the test agents, then in the Run Functional Tests step, you tell it:
What test agents to run the tests on
What tests to run (either by specifying a test assembly and category filters or a test plan)
How to distribute the tests across the specified test agents. You can choose to run them in parallel.
Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/vsts/build-release/tasks/test/run-functional-tests
Related
I'm running Azure pipelines on a Windows self-hosted agent. One of my pipelines can do both a 32-bit build and a 64-bit build. I want to use the matrix and maxParallel capabilities to do both builds at once, on the same agent, to save time.
This isn't possible, because the 32-bit build and the 64-bit build both write to the registry, and whoever gets there second, errors out.
The obvious solution is to get a second Azure VM and run a second self-hosted agent on that VM. But I want to see if I can run the two build tasks as two different users, on the theory that they will then write to their own HKCU and not clobber each other.
This would require the default pipeline to trigger a second pipeline, or perhaps run a template, and run it as a different user.
Can this be done?
OTHER USEFUL INFO:
On an Azure DevOps skill-level scale of Beginner-Intermediate-Expert, I'm smack in the middle of Intermediate. Still learning.
The build step uses the built-in VSBuild task.
You can trigger a second pipeline (i.e. by using Trigger Build Task), but pipelines don't have a concept of running as a user - they run on an agent. That agent runs as specific user and it would be tricky to try and execute code as a different user.
Running a second self-hosted agent is a good direction. You don't necessarily need another VM - you could run another agent on the same machine, but as a different user, using different work directory.
You could use agent capabilities and demands to fine tune which kind of build runs on which agent.
Whenever multiple builds are running on the same pipeline only the first build completes and the rest error.
I would the builds to run sequentially instead of in parallel like they are now, so that if two developers check-in at about the same time, the second build will also complete.
When editing the pipeline in the execution plan under the Parallelism heading I have the radio button set to "none" and they still seem to try to run in parallel anyway.
Can anyone suggest how to solve this issue?
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It seems you have multiple build agents. Assuming you are using self-hosted build agents, you could specify certain demands of the agent to use only one agent. In this way, if the agent is not free, the build will keep waiting. To use a particular agent, add a demand of Agent.Name equals agentname, check the screenshot below. Agent name can be found in capabilities of the agent.
I'm fresh in the area of CD/CI and I need to implement it in an old project from my company. From what I have read we have a couple of options like Azure DevOps or Team City, I chose these two options because most of our projects are built in Microsoft technologies.
I have been reading for a while, but I cannot grasp the proper definition of a Build Agent; also, I found this old question, but the answer is unclear:
In Team foundation server what is build agent and controller?
Further, I read different documentation:
Azure Pipelines agents
Build Agent
And their definitions are the following ones:
An agent is installable software that runs one job at a time.
Microsoft
A TeamCity Build Agent is a piece of software that listens for the
commands from the TeamCity server and starts the actual build
processes. JetBrains
However, I cannot understand exactly their role or purpose, do they build the Test, UAT and Production pipelines in parallel to see if the compilations were successful? Like here:
Or what do they do? Since the solution has multiple projects inside maybe 8 or 10.
You can take the example that I gave in the comments below:
Let's suppose you create a project in Azure DevOps for your new CRM
for a Dentist with a Debug, UAT, and Release environments plus a team
of 5 devs. What would represent these agents?
Thanks for any explanation.
It's analogous to a human "agent" who has different skills. Think of Build Agent as computer process that has certain capabilities to perform a build.
Some agents can perform certain jobs (e.g. build Apple specific programs), while other agents are more general purpose. Sometimes a computer can have multiple agents that can work in parallel, other times computers only have a single agent assigned to them.
Edit - Added the following to address additional questions:
Agents can be "local" which means they are on the server where the build software (e.g., Azure Pipelines, Bamboo, Team City). They can also be "remote" or on a different computer. A remote agent may be needed to build Apple specific software as this software often needs a Mac to compile.
Extending the human "agent" with different skills analogy, agents can be assigned jobs. So one agent may be assigned building software in your pipeline while another agent is busy handling deployments to different environments. Since each "agent" can only do a single job at a time, more agents can speed up build pipelines by allowing parallel jobs.
In Azure Devops,there is a left Navigation called pipelines where you need to create a build pipeline(with certain tasks) which actually requires an agent to perform the tasks.
In general,build agent/agent is a hosted machine with necessary capabilities(in case of Azure devops) used to run the predefined tasks as per the build pipeline setup to build the source code and make it available for deployment
I have a Windows VM that hosts a VSTS build agent. Due to the number and length of builds that are running I would like to know whether multiple build agents can be hosted on one computer? That would allow a dedicated agent for slow builds, and a dedicated agent for quick builds.
https://www.visualstudio.com/en-us/docs/build/admin/agents/v2-windows
Yes you can run multiple agents in a single VM.
Make two directories say Agent1 and Agent2, extract the agent in each one of them and configure them with different names against your VSTS/TFS account.
It should work out of the box.
We run 4 agent jobs per machine concurrently with no issues. As mentioned above, should work out of the box. Just make sure you clean up directories. We have a script to do it every night
Yes, this works, I did the following:
Created a PAT for agent installation needs
Downloaded agent binaries from the agent creation page
Unpacked the archive contents into 2 different directories ("c:\ado-build-agents\agent1" and "c:\ado-build-agents\agent2")
Ran "config.cmd" and followed configuration instructions, provided by it.
Updated pipelines to build the agent pool, which those agents reside in ("Default" in my case)
To test the setup - triggered all 15 pipelines, that I had. As the result I was able to see two pipelines running at the same time, while others were in the "Queued" state (according to my expectations).
I will be also testing out how resources are consumed by the agents to try to understand if I should deploy more agents on the build machine.
This question concerns use of the Jenkins Workflow plugin and "synchronizing" a stage amongst independent jobs.
We have a generic workflow for multiple projects with steps:
build project
push project to test environment
run (long) end-to-end test suite
push project to production
Step 3 runs a long time. If multiple projects are built and pushed to the test environment within the same window of time, we'd like to only run once the end-to-end test suite.
Can we have the jobs some how synchronize on step 3?
The desired orchestration can be achieved by make Step 3 a build action. I.e.
build end-to-end-tests
Where end-to-end-tests is a job dedicated to running the slow end-to-end tests.
Adding a Quiet period to end-to-end-tests supports the goal of "collecting" projects updated within a time period to end-to-end test. That is, if project A and B are pushed to the test environment with Quiet period seconds, then end-to-end-tests runs only once.
JENKINS-30269 might be helpful, but your use case is indeed subtly different from the usual one that RFE would solve; you really seem to need a cross-job stage, which is not currently possible though in principle such a step could be written. In the meantime, a downstream deployment job is probably the most reasonable workaround.