license for remote agents used for deployment

[Chris Wundram]

If you assign a remote agent for deployment, you can no longer use it for any builds. Does that mean it no longer counts against my license limit for remote build agents?

[James Dumay · Accepted solution]

All agents used, for both build and deploy, count towards your license limit.

[Chris Wundram]

That I what I was afraid of. It is a little disappointing. There is no way I can justify paying for a $1000 remote agent for a machine that is only going to be deployed to once a week or month.

Is there any chance the licensing model will change for deployment agents?

[roy_lyons]

Can I recommend using ssh/scp tasks instead of actual agents?

[Chris Wundram]

Yeah. I am using powershell remoting and the powershell task plugin to allow me to run a task remotely on another machine. It works but I had to do some URL trickery to figure out the location of the correct artifact so the remote host could download it.

Basically it works, but being able to just run the remote agent on each machine being deployed to would make this really powerful.

[klingberg]

I'm having about 100 remote servers where I'd like to deploy new releases about 5 times a year.

As Chris mentioned it's hard to justify paying the license fee for all of those environments.

I've successfully created a deployment project without any remote agents, only using the ssh-task and now I'm about to implement the ssh-task-setup at scale.

Do you got any experiences from the ssh-task-powershell setup that I should be aware of?

Why would the remote agent setup become more powerful?