Run Self-Hosted Containerised Build Agents using Azure Container Instance and Azure DevOps

Alberto De Natale
3 min readApr 15, 2021

Running build agent in containers is a great solution for achieving flexibility and reducing the costs of maintaining build agents.

In this article, I will run through all the steps needed to start one.

Set up your Dockerfile

The first step is creating a folder containing a Dockerfile.

Create an Azure Container Registry

We then create an Azure Container Registry.

az group create --name buildagent --location uksouth
az acr create --resource-group buildagent --name alberto --sku Basic

Build the Dockerfile in the Cloud with a Task

We build our image using an Azure Registry Task.

az acr build --registry alberto -t buildagent:v1.0 --platform windows .

Create a Personal Access Token in Azure DevOps

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Alberto De Natale

Alberto De Natale is a passionate tech-enthusiast software developer.