What are the differences between an Agent Job and a Deployment Group Job in Azure DevOps?

Question

What are the differences between an Agent Job and a Deployment Group Job in Azure DevOps? What are the reason to create one or the other?

Answer 1

What are the differences between an Agent Job and a Deployment Group Job in Azure DevOps?

Agent job:

Run steps on an agent which in an agent pool .

Deployment group jobs:

Run on machines in a deployment group .

These are the definition of them. You can see that, the fundamental difference between them is that the target when running the job are different.

For agent job, it can only run on one target at a time (unless set up parallel to run on multiple targets at a time, but parallel is essentially multiple jobs). And deployment group job is, since the deployment group is multiple machines are bound in a group, it can run a job on multiple machines at a time.

In the usage scenario, Agent job can used in both Build and Release pipeline. But for Deployment agent job , it can only be used in Release pipeline for application/project deploy.

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What are the reason to create one or the other?

In build pipeline, it should no doubt that you can only use Agent job (or Agentless) job.

I think what you concerned should be the usage in Release pipeline. As I mentioned above, these different jobs can all be used in Release pipeline, and they can all be used for project deployed.

But in terms of specific use, it depends on the task you will use and the number of target servers you want to deploy to.

Agent job:

If your deployment target server number less than 5 objects, and need to deploy to multiple machines at the same time, you can set up a parallel job for Agent job . The Agent job may take a little longer time than Deployment group job. But because the number of deployed targets is not too much, the difference is not obvious.

Deployment group job:

For medium and large companies, the Deployment target objects are generally more than 10, even 100. It is most appropriate to use Deployment group job, because it can be deployed on different machines in one job.

In release, recommend you use Deployment group job if you have multiple targets to deploy to: