Managing shared resources across Bamboo build agents

Question

We have a compiler on our remote agents that uses a floating license. Only a single agent can use this license at a time.

When one agent is building and another requests the license, the build fails. I would prefer that the build be queued until the license becomes available.

Is there any way to support this behavior?

daves · Answer

Is there any progress on such a feature? We have a number of examples of this. In particular, some of our regression tests involve multiple machines, and not always the same combination of machine (i.e. we can't dedicate all of the resources to a single agent, since it would force jobs which require disjoint subsets of the resources from executing in parallel). The potentially disjoint resources include software too licenses, hardware, network bandwidth through a switch, etc.

Marcin Gardias · Answer

> However then I would also need to prevent build plans that do not require this capability from executing on the special agent. Otherwise they would interfere with build plans that do require the capability.

This can be done too. You can define another capability on the agents without licence and require that on Jobs that do not require the floating licence. The net effect: Jobs that need licence queue on the single agent, all the others Jobs build on the 'noLicence' agents. I realise it is far from perfect if you have a lot of Jobs

Better support for assigning agents to Jobs is something we are definitely intending to add to the product, as you are not the only person asking for such a feature.

emddudley · Answer

Yes, I have multiple remote agents. All of my agents have the same capabilities. I am trying to minimize build queue times on our farm by creating redundant agents

If I define the "floating license" as a capability on a single agent this would technically solve the problem. However then I would also need to prevent build plans that do not require this capability from executing on the special agent. Otherwise they would interfere with build plans that do require the capability.