Implement a build strategy

In this post, I will share my study notes that I took while preparing for the exam Azure AZ400 “Implement a build strategy”.

Design and implement build agent infrastructure (include cost, tool selection, licenses, maintainability)

There are two types of build agents that may be configured with Azure DevOps: hosted and self-hosted.

Hosted agents are completely maintained by Microsoft and have common software required to build application already installed.

They have some limitations and (build duration, disk space, CPU/memory/network, interactivity and file shared) and can introduce some latency at the start of a build.

It is not possible to have incremental builds with hosted agents.

To install a self-hosted agent the following steps will be needed:

• A virtual machine will be needed, for instance, an Azure Virtual Machine
• A security token will be required with build and agent pools permissions
• The virtual machine will need to have the building tools required to build an application
• The agent software will need to be installed on the virtual machine

A pipeline that would want to use an agent from this pool will need the following YAML code:

pool:
  name: 'MyAgentPool'
  demands:
  - npm