Once we’ve linked LCS and Azure DevOps we’ll have to deploy the build server. This will be the heart of our CI/CD processes.
Even though the build virtual machine has the same topology as a developer box, it really isn’t a developer VM and should never be used as one, do not use it as a developer VM! It has Visual Studio installed in it, the AosService folder with all the standard packages and SQL Server with an AxDB, just like all other developer machines, but that’s not its purpose.
We won’t be using any of those features. The “heart” of the build machine is the build agent, an application which Azure DevOps uses to execute the build definition’s tasks from Azure DevOps.
We can also use Azure hosted build agents. Azure hosted agents allow us to run a build without a VM, the pipeline runs on Azure. We’ll see this later.
The build VM #
This VM is usually the dev box on Microsoft’s subscription but you can also use a regular cloud-hosted environment as a build VM.
When this VM is deployed there’s two things happening: the basic source code structure and the default build definition are created.
