Azure default devops agent how to connect to azure VM win os and upload exe and start stop services

Question

I've currently got a VM (win os) running in Azure. The vm has a service running. I would like the devops pipelines to:

• access the VM
• stop the service
• upload the new built service (built artifact)
• start the updated service

rdp and ssh are disabled on the vm

The main problem is that I've no idea how to access/be in the VM from devops pipelines.

Was wondering if there is specific powershell package I can use or any simple solution?

There is another similar question that takes in consideration creating custom agents in Azure and connected to devops How to access Azure VM from AzureDevOps Pipelines? But I would like to use the default devops agent available

Answer 1

If you use Azure Pipelines for your pipelines, you can use a Microsoft-hosted agent to run your jobs. Maintenance and upgrades are handled automatically with Microsoft-hosted agents. You get a new virtual machine for each job in the pipeline each time you run it. After one job, the virtual machine is deleted (which means any change that a job makes to the virtual machine file system, such as checking out code, will be unavailable to the next job). Jobs can be run directly on a VM or in a container using Microsoft-hosted agents.

Azure Pipelines comes with a pre-defined agent pool called Azure Pipelines, which is made up of Microsoft-hosted agents.

Agents that are self-hosted
A self-hosted agent is a job-running agent that you set up and administer yourself. In Azure Pipelines and Azure DevOps Server (previously Team Foundation Server), you can employ self-hosted agents (TFS). Self-hosted agents provide you more control over the software you require for your builds and deployments by allowing you to install it yourself. Furthermore, machine-level caches and configuration are persistent from run to run, which can improve performance.