Azure Pipelines - Sprint 205 Update

Features

• Support Group Managed Service Accounts as agent service account
• Informational runs
• Build Definition REST API retentionRules property is obsolete

Support Group Managed Service Accounts as agent service account

The Azure Pipelines agent now supports Group Managed Service Accounts on Self-hosted agents on Windows.

Group Managed Service Accounts (gSMAs) provide centralized password management for domain accounts that act as service accounts. The Azure Pipelines Agent can recognize this type of account so a password is not required during configuration:

.\config.cmd --url https://dev.azure.com/<Organization> `
             --auth pat --token <PAT> `
             --pool <AgentPool> `
             --agent <AgentName> --replace `
             --runAsService `
             --windowsLogonAccount <DOMAIN>\<gMSA>

Informational runs

An informational run tells you Azure DevOps failed to retrieve a YAML pipeline's source code. Such a run looks like the following.

Azure DevOps retrieves a YAML pipeline's source code in response to external events, for example, a pushed commit, or in response to internal triggers, for example, to check if there are code changes and start a scheduled run or not. When this step fails, the system creates an informational run. These runs are created only if the pipeline's code is in a GitHub or BitBucket repository.

Retrieving a pipeline's YAML code can fail due to:

• Repository provider experiencing an outage
• Request throttling
• Authentication issues
• Unable to retrieve the content of the pipeline's .yml file

Read more about Informational runs.

Build Definition REST API retentionRules property is obsolete

In the Build Definition REST API's BuildDefinition response type, the retentionRules property is now marked as obsolete, as this property always returns an empty set.

Next steps

Note

These features will roll out over the next two to three weeks.

Head over to Azure DevOps and take a look.

Go to Azure DevOps

How to provide feedback

We would love to hear what you think about these features. Use the help menu to report a problem or provide a suggestion.

You can also get advice and your questions answered by the community on Stack Overflow.