Deploy to on-prem servers from Azure DevOps

Azure Devops makes it extremely easy to deploy to cloud-native services. Azure is expectedly the easiest to deploy to but Kubernetes or even AWS and GCP are not very hard to set up.

Microsoft introduced deployment support for VMs a while back. But making it work involved trawling trough several docs so this blog post brings it all together.

Objective: Deploy a Windows Service to an on-premises VM using only Azure DevOps

Given the code for an Windows Service we want dto deploy a service to 2 environments. In this case they are named CORP and PROD. It could also be DEV, TEST and PROD or more complex topologies.

Other solutions are available. Octopus Deploy in particular is doing an excellent job in this space.

Set up Environment

From Pipeline / Environment / New Environment, select “Virtual Machines”

It is then possible to copy a script to run on each VM. This script essentially downloads the Azure Devops agent and configures it for deployment. The main command is:

.\config.cmd --environment --environmentname "TEST" --agent $env:COMPUTERNAME --runasservice --work '_work' --url 'https://myproject.visualstudio.com/' --projectname 'MyProject' --auth PAT --token <YOUR_PAT>

Configured machine appear in the environment:

Set up pipeline

- stage: Deployment
  dependsOn: Build

  jobs:
  - deployment: DeployTEST
    displayName: 'Deploy to TEST'
    environment: 
      name: TEST
      resourceType: VirtualMachine ## required to tell AZDO to deploy to VMs. 

    strategy:
      runOnce:    #rolling, canary are the other strategies that are supported
        deploy:
          steps:
          - template: deploy-windows-service.yml

Full files: