I'm looking into utilizing Azure DevOps release pipelines and deployment groups to automate deployment processes that are currently being done manually within my company. We have a web app that communicates with several hundred desktop apps. Utilizing the deployment groups and release pipeline processes to publish the web app to a demo and production environment seem rather straightforward.
What I'm struggling with is how we might do this on several hundred client machines running the desktop app. We have the means to easily add all of those machines to a deployment group (by remotely running the powershell script provided by azure), but I have concerns about using deployment groups in this manner.
Main question: Is there a hard limit to the number of targets that can be added to a deployment group? From everything I've read, it seems the intended use of deployment groups is for a smaller number of servers / VM's (like our web app use-case). Can the azure release pipeline handle deploying an app update to hundreds of target devices -- or rather, is it even MEANT to be used this way?
Clients will often shut down their machines, or may experience network issues. Are there issues with attempting to deploy to a bunch of offline targets? Or will they automatically be deployed to when they come online?
