Parallel jobs in Azure DevOps
In Azure DevOps, when pipelines are queued they are called as jobs and single pipeline may have one or more jobs. Each jobs run on a agent based on the agent pool and the other demands that are defined in the job (Be it a build or release pipeline, they are all called as jobs). When a organization has 2 jobs running at the same time, then the organization is said to consume “2” parallel jobs.
Scenario 1: Suppose let us say a pipeline has 4 stages and each stage has 1 job and each stage is configured to run on an different individual agent and the stages doesn’t depend upon each other. When the pipeline gets executed then all the 4 stages will run concurrently and they will be running on 4 individual agents. In this case, the organization is said to consume 4 parallel jobs
Scenario 2: Suppose let us say a pipeline has a single stage but 4 different jobs which doesn’t depend upon each other. when such a pipeline is executed then the jobs will run individually on 4 different agent machines. In this case also, the organization is said to consume 4 parallel jobs.
For certain Public projects, Azure DevOps provides a free limit of parallel jobs whereas for private parallel jobs it’s 60 minutes per day and altogether 1800 minutes per month and there are certain factors that control the limit of parallel jobs for Azure DevOps. See here on how to increase Parallel jobs for an Azure DevOps organization.
