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Azure Pipelines- Agentless/Server jobs

While demonstrating some new Azure DevOps (TFS) functionalities to a customer, I got the following question; “What are agentless jobs?”.

Good question, let’s try to give an answer:

In Azure Pipelines there are 4 types of jobs:

  • Agent pool jobs run on an agent in an agent pool.
  • Server jobs run on the Azure DevOps server.
  • Container jobs run in a container on an agent in an agent pool.
  • Deployment group jobs run on machines in a deployment group. These jobs are only available in a release pipeline.

Our question is related to the second type of jobs; server jobs also known as agentless jobs.

Where most of the jobs are executed by a build agent, server jobs are executed directly on the Azure DevOps application server.  This means that a server job does not require an agent or any target computers.

Creating an agentless job

To create an agentless job, open up a build pipeline. Click on the … button at the pipeline level and choose Add an agentless job from the dropdown menu.

Now a new agentless job phase is added to your build pipeline.

Inside this phase, you can add tasks similar to the other phases.

Remark: Notice that only a limited set of tasks is supported in the Agentless job phase.

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