Understanding the types of agents in Azure Pipelines
Azure Pipelines offers two types of agents:
- Microsoft-hosted agents
- Self-hosted agents
Let's look at them in detail.
Microsoft-hosted agents
Microsoft-hosted agents are fully managed VMs, deployed and managed by Microsoft. You can choose to use a Microsoft-hosted agent with no additional pre-requisites or configurations. Microsoft-hosted agents are the simplest and are available at no additional cost.
Every time you execute a pipeline, you get a new VM for running the job, and it's discarded after one use.
Self-hosted agents
Self-hosted agents are servers owned by you, running in any cloud platform or data center owned by you. Self-hosted agents are preferred due to various reasons, including security, scalability, and performance.
You can configure your self-hosted agent to have the dependencies pre-installed, which will help you decrease the time for your pipeline execution.
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