Roadmap › Azure DevOps & CI/CD › Module: Azure Pipelines
Lessons in this course (10)
7. Agents, pools and service connections
IntermediateMediumLesson 7 of 10
- Microsoft-hosted agents — fresh VM per job, preinstalled tools, no maintenance; limited free minutes/parallel jobs; no access to private networks.
- Self-hosted agents — your VM/container; persistent caches; reach on-prem/private resources; you patch them. Scale with VM scale set agents or Managed DevOps Pools.
- Parallel jobs — licensed concurrency.
- Service connections — secure, reusable credentials to external systems: Azure Resource Manager (prefer workload identity federation — no secrets to rotate), Docker registry, Kubernetes, GitHub, generic. Restrict per pipeline and add approvals.
- Agent capabilities/demands — route jobs to agents with required tools.