How to add agents to a queue in Visual Studio Team

Question

I'm trying out Team Services and I see that I can add queues but I can't add any agents to them. In fat, I had two starting queues: Default and Hosted and only the latter had an agent in it.

1. Are agents necessary for enabling automatic builds or am I a victim of misconception?
2. How do I do more agents to the queues?

Answer 1

To Add more Hosted Agents, which as of this writing cost $40 each, you also have to have an Azure account and have it linked to your Visual Studio Team Services account.

Assuming your VSTS and Azure accounts are linked, log in to the new Azure Portal, go to All Resources and search for Team Services Account. Select your Team and then choose the option Build And Deployment service. The first option that shows up is Hosted Agents which defaults to 1, and you can increase up to 5 per pool.

Answer 2

If you're going to be depending on Microsoft to provide the agents, use the Hosted queue. You can't add machines to the hosted queue, the idea there is that agents are provisioned on-the-fly for your builds.

For other queues, you need to install and configure an agent on a machine (whether on-prem or in Azure/AWS). For Windows machines, there's a download link right on the agent pool screen.

For non-Windows machines, you can install the Node.JS build agent from NPM.