Agents and agent queues
The build definitions that you have created so far can contain agent jobs, which in turn contain tasks. These tasks are not executed within your Azure DevOps organization directly but are instead executed by agents that run on VMs or in containers. In turn, agents are grouped in agent pools. There are two types of agent pools that you can work with:
- Built-in agent pools
- Self-hosted agent pools
Let’s go through them one by one.
Built-in agent pools
Built-in agent pools are managed by Microsoft and are made available to you as part of the Azure DevOps product itself. There are different agent pools available, depending on your needs. Pools run different versions of Windows and Visual Studio, and there are also pools available that run Linux (Ubuntu) and macOS.
The disadvantage of these managed pools is that you cannot install extra software on the machines or containers that host the agents if you need to. This means that, in...
