Reduce your build time with parallelism in Azure DevOps

Your team works with a project in Azure DevOps. Your build time starts to increase as the project’s complexity grows but you want your CI build to deliver results as quickly as possible. How can you do that? With parallelism, of course!

Let’s do this together.

Prerequisites

Before we start to design a build pipeline with parallelism we must be aware of how Azure DevOps orchestrate parallelism and how many parallel jobs we can start. I recommend to read the official Microsoft Docs page about this.

Designing the build

The following example shows how to design a build with:

  1. A first “initialization” job.
  2. The proper build jobs: build 1 and build 2 that we want to run in parallel after the step 1.
  3. A final step that we want to execute after that build 1 and build 2 are completed.

We start with configuring the build to look like the following picture:

To orchestrate the jobs as we specified before we use the “Dependencies” feature. For the first job we have no dependencies so leave the field blank.

For the Build 1 job we set the value to Init. This way we’re instructing Azure DevOps to start the Build 1 job only after that Init has completed.

We do the same thing with the Build 2 job.

For the final step we set Build 1 and Build 2 as dependencies so this phase will wait for the 2 previous builds to complete before starting.

Here we can see the build pipeline while it’s executing.

TL;DR

With this brief tutorial we learned how to design a build pipeline with dependencies and parallelism that can reduce the delay of our CI processes. A fast and reliable CI process is always a good practice because we must strive to gather feedback as quickly as possible from our processes and tools. This way we can resolve issues in the early stages of our ALM, keeping the costs down and avoiding problems with customers.

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