Deploy artifacts to physical machine with Azure Pipelines - azure

Question

I have a project that is built with an azure pipeline, the artifacts are sent to both the File Share and Azure DevOps. A self hosted agent is currently used for the pipeline that builds my project. Now I want to deploy my artifacts on a physical computer in the network of my company. Artifacts are installation files that support "silent installation mode", so I can install everything by executing corresponding files with PowerShell.
My question is: What should I do to achieve my goal? I considered that I would simply create a release pipeline (I use Microsoft's classic UI editor for pipelines) and add the necessary tasks. In the end everything will look something like this:
Copy artifacts from the computer on which the product was built (A)
to the computer on which the product is to be installed (B).
Perform the installation of services that are required for the main
application.
Perform the installation from the main application. Is this the
right course of action or should I choose something else?
One more question. It is not entirely clear to me how I should divide the deployment stages, because: Step 1 is still done by the agent on the computer A. Steps 2 and 3 should already do another agent. Hence, an agent must be also present on the computer B (in total I need two agents, one for the build pipeline on the computer A and one on the target computer B). Is that correct?

Answer 1

Deploy artifacts to physical machine with Azure Pipelines
I think you are very close to the answer, but I am not sure whether the advice I provided is the best, because it is more a matter of taste, you can check my suggestions below.
We could achieve this by one agent on the computer A:
Use the Remote Copy task to copy the artifact to the computer B by the agent on the computer A.
Use the Powershell execute install files with command line arguments on remote computer the agent on the computer A.
In this case, we do not need to create a new agent on the computer B, and also no need to divide the deployment stages.

Answer 2

We have a web application that has a similar requirement, we need to include location specific files when we deploy our application to that location.
I'm not sure this is the best route, but we incorporated using Ansible in our deployment pipeline. Our Ansible playbook utilizes the hosts file which contains variables for the location and the jar version to be deployed.
Again, our situation is different, but the same should work.
For instance, you may be able to something like this...
Your Ansible inventory (hosts) file may look like this
[servers]
xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
[all:vars]
app_name=mfgweb
env=qa
app_version=2020.03.4
*** If your artifact is a jar file
jar_group=com.somegroup
jar_name=some_jar <-- note: no extentsion
jar_version=2019.11.3
Your playbook may look something like this
---
- hosts: localhost
connection: local
tasks:
- name: Find old working directories
find:
paths: /tmp
patterns: 'ansible.*'
file_type: directory
age: 2d
register: tmp_dirs
- name: Cleanup old working directories
file:
path: "{{ item }}"
state: absent
loop: "{{ tmp_dirs.files | map(attribute='path') | list }}"
- name: Create working directory
tempfile:
state: directory
suffix: work
register: workdir
- name: Download artifact
maven_artifact:
group_id: "{{ jar_group }}"
artifact_id: "{{ jar_name }}"
version: "{{ jar_version }}"
repository_url: "{{ artifacts_url }}"
username: "{{ artifacts_user }}"
password: "{{ artifacts_password }}"
verify_checksum: never
dest: "{{ workdir.path }}/{{ app_name }}/"
This is just a sample, but you would be able to install required software in you playbook using yum and/or pip.