I am looking on how to do release pipelines to on-prem servers. I have read about self-hosted agents that are part of an agent pool. But I am also reading about deployment groups for target servers. Correct me if I am wrong, but deployment groups seem like a decentralized deployment as each target machine needs the agent installed and is responsible for deploying files onto the same machine. Also I read that deployment groups only work with classic release pipelines. So are deployment groups deprecated? Any guidance would be appreciated.
Apart from classic release pipelines, you can use YAML to author CI/CD pipelines, Create your first pipeline.
It's possible. All you need is a self-hosted agent and a deployment group. In my pipeline build I used the following tasks: MSBuild@1 PublishBuildArtifacts@1 Then in Release Pipeline: IIS Deployment
You can check availability and upcoming features at Azure DevOps Feature Timeline
References: Is it possible to connect azure pipelines to on premise servers?
Automating deployments to on premise servers with Azure DevOps