Meister Remote Agents

Remote Agents enhance the build to release processes by allowing tasks in the Workflow to be distributed across multiple machines and operating systems.   Remote Agents can be used to support distributed processing,  parallel processing, multi-platform builds, multi-language builds and dedicated builds.

A distributed build is one in which individual steps in the Workflow are sent to be executed on multiple machines.  In doing this you are able to leverage more machine power instead of attempting to run the entire Workflow on a single machine.

Remote Agents also support parallel processing.  A Parallel process executes Workflows for each unique stage of the development lifecycle including continuous integration builds for developers, pre-production builds for testers and emergency builds for production control. A Remote Agent can be configured to execute builds according to the location that the binaries will be distributed. 

Workflows can be configured to call Remote Agents that are  running different operating systems and languages.  This allows you to execute a Workflow that builds the application across multiple operating systems or build specific components of the application on the appropriate machine.   For example, a Workflow that needs to build Windows .Net components as well as AIX Oracle back-end components would use two Remote Agents one for Windows and one for AIX. 

Remote Agents can also be used as 'dedicated build machines'.  A dedicated “Build Machine” is often bigger and faster than a regular desktop machine.  The dedicated build machine would be configured as a Remote Agent in which Workflows could be executed in order to improve the workflow processing.  In addition, if you are using Meister's Build Automation, a dedicated machine with multi-processing power can be used to manage the calls to the compilers and linkers and accelerate the building of C and Java applications.