A set of agents for running Azure Pipelines jobs, created for the whole organisation and shared with projects. Pool roles and pipeline permissions govern who manages it and which pipelines may use it; in GitHub, runner groups play this part.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Agent pool in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- Set
Secret permission in Key Vault for writing secrets; some older material refers to it as Create.
- Azure Pipelines
CI/CD service within Azure DevOps that deploys applications and infrastructure as code, with environments, approvals and checks.
- Pipeline permissions
Controls which YAML pipelines may use a protected resource such as an agent pool, environment, repository, secure file, variable group or service connection. With Open access, any project pipeline can.
- Govern
The part of the Cloud Adoption Framework concerned with keeping cloud use under control by setting guardrails made of policies, procedures and tools. It runs continuously across the estate alongside Secure and Manage.
Related terms
- Build Administrators
A project security group in Azure DevOps that looks after pipelines and, by default, has Administrator rights on every agent pool.
- Maintenance job
A timed job for an agent pool that tidies up old working folders and repositories. It is set up in the organisation's pool settings by someone with Manage build queues permission; nothing runs unless a schedule exists, and a job left waiting in the queue fails after seven days.
- Pool consumption report
Plots, for up to 30 days, how many jobs an agent pool had running and queued compared with online agents or parallel job concurrency. Found on the pool's Analytics tab.
- Readers
Gives view-only rights within an Azure DevOps project, for example over releases and pipelines. Don't confuse it with Azure's Reader role or the agent pool Reader role.