A deployment group is a logical set of deployment target machines that have agents installed on each one. Deployment groups represent the physical environments; for example, "Dev", "Test", "UAT", and "Production". In effect, a deployment group is just another grouping of agents, much like an agent pool.

When authoring an Azure Pipelines or TFS Release pipeline, you can specify the deployment targets for a job using a deployment group. This makes it easy to define parallel execution of deployment tasks.

Deployment groups:

Specify the security context and runtime targets for the agents. As you create a deployment group, you add users and give them appropriate permissions to administer, manage, view, and use the group.
Let you view live logs for each server as a deployment takes place, and download logs for all servers to track your deployments down to individual machines.
Enable you to use machine tags to limit deployment to specific sets of target servers.

Instructions

1. Go to Pipelines - Deployment groups page and choose to create a new deployment group.

2. Give it a name and description, click Create.

3. On the right, you will now see a script that will be used for agent creation on the target machine(s) in your deployment group. This script will remain available after creation of the deployment group for later referral.

4. Check the option to Use a personal access token and then Copy the script to the clipboard.

5. You now need to connect to the each target machine in the deployment group and run the agenct creation script in and administrator powershell command window.

6. The agent creation script will prompt you to assign tags to the machine. There is no limit on the number of tags you can assign. The following is the output from the script for the example above:

    Directory: C:\azagent


Mode                LastWriteTime         Length Name
----                -------------         ------ ----
d-----       2019-05-28   9:13 AM                A1

>> Connect:

Connecting to server ...

>> Register Agent:

Scanning for tool capabilities.
Connecting to the server.
Enter deployment group tags for agent? (Y/N) (press enter for N) > Y
Enter Comma separated list of tags (e.g web, db) > WebServer
Tags added successfully
Successfully added the agent
Testing agent connection.
2019-05-28 13:15:01Z: Settings Saved.
Enter User account to use for the service (press enter for NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM) >
Granting file permissions to 'NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM'.
Service vstsagent.DSD-Marine.NCRWS535 successfully installed
Service vstsagent.DSD-Marine.NCRWS535 successfully set recovery option
Service vstsagent.DSD-Marine.NCRWS535 successfully set to delayed auto start
Service vstsagent.DSD-Marine.NCRWS535 successfully configured
Service vstsagent.DSD-Marine.NCRWS535 started successfully


PS C:\azagent\A1>

7. Your deployment group should now be showing the online status in DevOps.

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