Sharing Agent Queue For Prod and Stag Environment in TFS Build/Release Definition

Question

I am trying to setup build and release definition in TFS 2015. I have set up multiple agent queues for different environments Staging, Production, Load, UAT. I have different physical agents for each of this environment and each agent has permission to connect to respective environment to deploy code.

My Question is how do i share agents over these environments. Is it possible to have one agent which has permission to all these environment and can deploy code to IIS website. My websites name is also same in each environmetn. For e.g. abc.com (UAT), abc.com (PROD).

TFS version is 2015.

Answer 1

Fundamentally there's nothing stopping it, you will need to look at a couple of things though.

First does the agent/VM have access to all the environments? Often environments are in different AD domains, so you may have an agent that is in/can see your UAT domain, but is unable to access the PROD domain. If that's fine, secondly, you will need to make sure that the user the agent is running on has permissions also, it may be the machine can see both domains, but the agent is running under an account like [email protected], and your other agent runs under a [email protected] account.

If both the agent/VM and agent user can see both/all domains, then you need to consider security (what's stopping a dev changing a name, or the deploy process, and pushing something live with no oversight, etc?).