Dedicating agents to a particular deployment project do not allow that project tasks to run on other available agents even if other available agents meet all requirements for those tasks.

[ashleyg]

This question is in reference to Atlassian Documentation: Dedicating an agent

Dedicating agents to a particular deployment project do not allow that project tasks to run on other available agents even if other available agents meet all requirements for those tasks. This is what is currently happening for one of my depployment projects.

My understanding is that you can force deployment projects/any bamboo build jobs to run on specific agents by defining custom requirements that match agent capabilities, and also that you can dedicate agents to run only certain specific jobs/deployment tasks.

So in my case, i have few agents that we dedicate to run our build projects and deployment projects every time we have one created. So we got a new deployment project and it showed 25 agents available to run it. But we wanted it to run on only our 10 dedicated agents, so we defined custom requirement matching those agent capability and dedicated those 10 agents for this deployment project as well. Then it showed 10 agents capable to run it, but after removing the custom requirement, as per my understanding it should now show availability of 35 agents ,instead of 10, but to my surprise it still shows only 10 agents capable to run it.

Kindly let me know if my understanding is incorrect , because i couldn't find any bamboo documentation that illustrates this. I only see how you can force run jobs/deployment projects on certain agents or how you can dedicate your agents to run only specific jobs/deployment tasks.

Thanks,

Ashley

[Tim Crall · Accepted solution]

It's a little counter intuitive and poorly documented, but dedicating an agent is a two-way street.  If an agent is dedicated to a build plan, that agent will only run that plan's builds, and that plan will only run on that agent.

This is why whenever possible we try to use capabilities to define what agents a plan should run on, and avoid dedicating agents.

[ashleyg]

Thanks Tim for the prompt reply.

So does that mean if we dedicate an agent A to run x, y, z plans/deployment projects, then both things happen:-

1) x,y,z can only run on agent A, even if there are other agents capable to run them.

2) Agent A can only run x,y,z unless dedicated to run other plans/deployment projects

So from this i can make sure that i don't need to define custom requirements on these plan jobs/deployment tasks, if i have dedicated agents to run them.Because you meant that would ensure these plans will always run on those agents only.

Is that right?

[Tim Crall]

I believe that to all be correct, yes.

[Mark de Bont]

Yes, I also found that dedicating an agent to a deployment plan takes away the agent for other use of build plans ;-s