Azure Service Fabric - continuous integration on VSTS

Question

Is it possible to setup Continuous Integration on VSTS without using external VM as build agent (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/service-fabric-set-up-continuous-integration/)?

What I would like to achieve is to have one Service Fabric Solution with 2 statefull/stateless services (serviceA and serviceB). I want to build and deploy them separately as different build jobs on VSTS, but to deployed them to the same Service Fabric Cluster on Azure (fabric:/App/ServiceA, fabric:/App/ServiceB).

Answer 1

As of the Service Fabric SDK 2.1.150 and Runtime 5.1.150 release, it is possible to deploy Service Fabric application using VSTS's hosted build agent as the dependencies can be added via a NuGet package - refer to the following video for details. http://www.dotjson.uk/azure-service-fabric-continous-integration-and-deployment-in-15-minutes/

In your specific case; just create 2 build definitions (1 for each service) and 2 release definitions (1 for each service) and hook them up to the same hosted Service Fabric cluster.

Answer 2

Unfortunately deploying applications relies on the Service Fabric SDK being installed so you'll need to set up an agent as the instructions suggest. If you don't want to pay for the Azure VM, you might want to consider running the agent service locally e.g. On your devbox.

Note that with Service Fabric you deploy applications, not services. You can however update services independently.

Answer 3

It sounds like you need to have service fabric SDK installed on the build machine, and I'm guessing the hosted agent doesn't have that. If that's the case, then yes you need to create your own build server VM