What is Resource

Resource means any physical or virtual component of limited availability within the grid, and is provided by grid node. A build step can declare to require certain resources to run. If some nodes are found with desired resources, the step will run on the fastest node; otherwise, the step will wait until a node with free resource is available. This way, the resource contention problem between builds and steps can be solved efficiently.

For instance, we can define the CPU processor resource representing all CPU processors of all agents in the grid, and declare that master step of the build requires the processor resource. This guarantees that a processor will run one and only one build. If processor resource is currently used up, new build requests will wait until there is a free one. Another example is that you have a single deployment machine in your grid, and only one deployment step can deploy to that machine in the same time. In this case, you may define a deployment resource corresponding to that machine, and for each deploy step, define it to require the deployment resource.

Define Resources

Resource can be defined in the resource tab. When define a resource, you will need to specify which grid node will provide the resource, and how many it will provide. Below screenshot defines a CPU processor resource, and all build agents can provide this resource, with the resource count set to system property qb.processor.number: