Utilize Deployment Group Job in YAML Pipeline

Azure DevOps deployment pipelines offer three types of jobs: agent job, deployment group job, and agentless job. However, YAML pipelines require an alternative approach as they lack direct support for deployment group jobs. Virtual machine resources in environments are utilized to achieve similar functionality as deployment groups, and this blog explains how to do it.

Prerequisites:

• Azure DevOps environment provisioned with virtual machine resources.
• Fundamental understanding of pipeline configuration

As a prerequisite, an environment called Test-dev has been provisioned and a virtual machine has been added to it.

A tag called "dev" has been added to the virtual machine.

To perform deployment group deployments, create a YAML pipeline with the following job structure. Provide the environment name, resourceType, and tags.

jobs:

      - deployment: VMDeployment

        displayName: CD

        environment:

          name: Test-dev

          resourceType: VirtualMachine

          tags: dev

        strategy:

          runOnce:

            deploy:

              steps:

              - checkout: self   

When the pipeline run, the correct virtual machine will be assigned as the pipeline agent, as shown in the below image. 

Below is the full pipeline script. Virtual machines that match the specified tag will act as the deployment

group, and a text file will be created at C:\temp\test.txt inside the virtual machine.

trigger:
  branches:
    include:
      - develop

pool: 
  name: "Azure Pipelines"
  vmImage: ubuntu-20.04

stages:
  - stage: Deployment
    displayName: Deploy to VM 

    jobs:
      - deployment: VMDeployment
        displayName: CD
        environment:
          name: Test-dev
          resourceType: VirtualMachine
          tags: dev
        strategy:
          runOnce:
            deploy:
              steps:
              - checkout: self      
              - task: PowerShell@2
                displayName: createfile 
                inputs:
                  targetType: 'inline'
                  script: 'New-Item C:\temp\test.txt'