Run task on target Machine during release in Azure DevOps?

Question

In my current organization we are using Azure DevOps Server (on-prem) to release our products. The current setup is that we have a bunch of build and release agents running on a set of VMs. The servers that we actually release to are different machines than the ones running the release and build agents, therfor we end up using alot of "PowerShell on target Machine" tasks during the release to configure and setup dependencies for our products.(asp.net websites in this case).. However.. what I find strange is that due to this setup we cant really utilize other tasks to setup our environment/target-machines. For instance, lets say that we would like to use the "extract files"-task, then this would not be possible since the extraction would happen in our agent and not in our environment/target Machine.

Are we missing something or are you actually supposed to basically only use the "PowerShell on target-machine"-task for such a scenario?

Answer 1

You are right, most of the tasks are running on the machine of where the agent is installed. if you want to run the agent in one VM and deploy with this agent to another VM you can use out-of-the-box with the PowerShell on target machine or Copy files to remote machine, or SSH tasks.

But, in the marketplace you can find many tasks that can do things to remote machines, include zip or unzip files.

If you can it's really recommended to install the agents on your target machines.