TeamCity 2020.2 comes with an exciting new feature called “agentless build steps”.
It is useful whenever you want to call an external service during your builds that does not respond immediately, but takes an indefinite amount of time to run.
Examples could be 3rd party deployment services, scripts running on your servers to prepare environments, or services used for manual QA verifications and deployment approvals.
Before TeamCity 2020.2, such calls would block your build agent while it was waiting for the response from the service. With “agentless build steps” you can now reuse the agent for other builds, during the wait.
Check out the screencast demonstrating the new feature in action:
Licensing
For every build agent license you have, you can run one normal build and simultaneously one agentless build.
Examples:
- 1 build agent license -> run 1 regular build and 1 agentless build
- 3 build agent licenses -> run 3 regular builds and 3 agentless builds
- etc.
For more details on the inner workings of the feature, have a look at our documentation.