Pipelines: Stages, Jobs, Steps & Agents

The Integrated Suite

Azure DevOps bundles Repos (Git hosting), Pipelines (CI/CD), Boards (work tracking, like Jira), Artifacts (package feeds), and Test Plans (manual test management) — an integrated platform rather than a single narrow tool. Despite being Microsoft's product, Pipelines is language-agnostic (Node, Python, Java...) and can deploy to AWS/GCP, not just Azure.

azure-pipelines.yml

trigger:
  branches:
    include: [main]

stages:
  - stage: Build
    jobs:
      - job: BuildAndTest
        pool:
          vmImage: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
          - task: NodeTool@0
            inputs:
              versionSpec: '20.x'
          - script: npm ci
          - script: npm test

  - stage: Deploy
    dependsOn: Build
    jobs:
      - deployment: DeployProd
        environment: production   # can require manual approval here

Hierarchy: pipeline → stages (Build, Deploy) → jobs (can run in parallel) → steps (run in order within a job). Keeping stages separate lets deploy gate on Build succeeding, with an environment approval pausing for manual sign-off before production.

Agents

Microsoft-hosted agents are pre-configured, ephemeral VMs — convenient, minimal setup. Self-hosted agents run on infrastructure you maintain — needed for internal network access, specific hardware, or tighter control over the build environment/caching.

Tasks & Triggers

Tasks (NodeTool@0, PublishBuildArtifacts@1) are pre-built, reusable step implementations from Microsoft/community catalogs — similar to GitHub Actions' marketplace. trigger configures what starts a run: branch pushes, PR triggers, or schedules.