Currently, most software teams that are using Azure DevOps to build their software choose to use Azure-hosted agents as their build server. This comes with a lot of benefits. Many libraries are already installed on these agents so it's quite compatible with most projects' specifications. For every build, you get a new agent that is provisioned and after the build will be destroyed. However, this has its own limitations. Azure Hosted Agents are using a specific type of VM so it is not possible to increase hardware specifications. If your projects also have libraries that are not supported by Azure Hosted agents, you need to install them on the agents. This might not be an issue for projects that have started in recent years, but if you have a legacy code that takes an hour to build then you might start to think about how you can speed up the build process. For such a situation, there are a lot of solutions like reconsidering the architecture of software and so on which is not the scope of this article. In this article, I am going to focus on how you can create a custom self-hosted agent.
Custom Self Hosted Agent
With Azure DevOps, it is possible to create an agent pool and add our own agents. These agents can be your personal laptop, on-premise server, or virtual machine. What we want to do in this tutorial is to see how we can create a fully automated process in which we create a custom Windows image. This gives us the benefit of having an image containing all the applications and settings we need. Additionally, we can provision a virtual machine using this image with desired hardware specifications.
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