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What is the purpose of a build agent in continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment? Is this something that impacts all CI servers (e.g. Jenkins, TeamCity, TFS, etc.)
On the TeamCity license types page I noted that the professional server license, which is free, only includes three build agents.
https://www.jetbrains.com/teamcity/buy/#license-type=new-license
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A build agent is a piece of software that runs a series of build tasks called a job, on a machine. In Azure pipelines, there are two types of build agents, Microsoft-hosted agent, and self-hosted agents.
Continuous integration refers to the build and unit testing stages of the software release process. Every revision that is committed triggers an automated build and test. With continuous delivery, code changes are automatically built, tested, and prepared for a release to production.
Continuous Delivery is similar to Continuous Integration. You are building a product that can be released to production at any time. Continuous Delivery requires building, testing, and releasing faster and more frequently. Continuous Integration happens before you build as you are testing code.
Continuous Integration (CI) is a DevOps software development practice that enables the developers to merge their code changes in the central repository to run automated builds and tests. Continuous Delivery (CI) is a DevOps practice that refers to the building, testing, and delivering improvements to the software code.
The expression build agent basically describes an environment in which builds or jobs of the CI pipeline are run. There are multiple synonyms for this part of the CI infrastructure. TeamCity seems to define a build agent as an environment where one build at a time can run.
Jenkins would define the machine which runs builds as a slave with a (different) master machine that coordinates which builds runs where. Multiple builds can run on the same slave in Jenkins in different executor slots.
Another system using a build agent is a Team Foundation server which should be structured similarly to TeamCity's solution. There has already been a more detailed answer here.
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