Team Services deploy to on-premise Service Fabric without exposed endpoint

Question

We have a Service Fabric cluster on-premise and would like to deploy code to it from Visual Studio Team Services. We use this cluster for testing and it does not have an endpoint exposed to the outside world. It is only accessible internally from inside our network.

From inside Team Services the normal way to deploy a Service Fabric application is with the "Service Fabric Application Deployment" task. This task requires a "Cluster Connection" parameter, or link to the Service Fabric Service endpoint that Team Services can access. On this cluster I can't provide an endpoint to the outside world, so this method won't work.

Is there a good, accepted way of accomplishing this? I'm considering looking at having an Agent on one of the Service Fabric nodes that can run a PowerShell script as part of the build process. I can kick off a PowerShell script on the node as part of the build process. If I could retrieve the artifacts from Team Services with this script I believe the rest of the release would be relatively straightforward.

Is this a good line of thought, or is there a more straightforward way to deploy to Service Fabric from Team Services without exposing an endpoint?

Answer 1

We have the same set up and using VSTS. We set up a On-Prem agent pool where agent is within our network. The agent is hook with VSTS so build and release can be trigger from VSTS. Agent have access to the artifact on VSTS and can download it for deployment. The different might be we set up a service fabric end point instead of using powershell.

Its a very simple set up and works well for us.Good luck