The Techy Boy

Release gates give you more control over the start and completion of the deployment pipeline. They're often set up as pre-deployment and post-deployment conditions. Think of downtime of a database server or an update of an API. It takes much time and effort, and the only thing needed is a signal if the release can continue.  You can create a mechanism where people press a button on a form when the release can't advance.  When the release starts, it checks the state of the gate by calling an API. If the "gate" is open, we can continue. Otherwise, we'll stop the release. By using scripts and APIs, you can create your release gates instead of manual approval. Or at least extending your manual approval. Approvals and gates  give you more control over the start and completion of the deployment pipeline. Whereas, a  quality gate  is the best way to enforce a quality policy in your organization. It's there to answer one question: can I deliver my application to produ...

Continuous Delivery is all about delivering on-demand.  But, as we discussed in the differences between release and deployment, delivery, or deployment, it's only the technical part of the Continuous Delivery process.  It's all about how you can technically install the software on an environment, but it doesn't say anything about the process that needs to be in place for a release. Release approvals don't control  how  but control  if  you want to deliver multiple times a day. Manual approvals also suit a significant need. Organizations that start with Continuous Delivery often lack a certain amount of trust. They don't dare to release without manual approval. After a while, when they find that the approval doesn't add value and the release always succeeds, the manual approval is often replaced by an automatic check. Things to consider when you're setting up a release approval are: What do we want to achieve with the approval? Is it an approval that we need...

Both the release and stages make use of triggers. There are three types of triggers we recognize. Continuous deployment trigger You can set up this trigger on your release pipeline. Once you do that, your release pipeline will trigger every time a build completes, and a new release will be created. Scheduled triggers This speaks for itself, but it allows you to set up a time-based manner to start a new release—for example, every night at 3:00 AM or 12:00 PM. You can have one or multiple schedules per day, but it will always run at this specific time. Manual trigger With a manual trigger, a person or system triggers the release based on a specific event. When it's a person, it probably uses some UI to start a new release. When it's an automated process, some events will likely occur. You can trigger the release from another system using the automation engine   Navigation Traditional IT deployment cycle What is Continuous Delivery? What is release, and what is a deployment? Azure...

When you have a clear view of the different stages you'll deploy, you need to think about when you want to deploy to these stages.  Continuous Delivery is about deploying multiple times a day and can deploy on-demand. When we define our cadence, questions that we should ask ourselves are: Do we want to deploy our application? Do we want to deploy multiple times a day? Can we deploy to a stage? Is it used? A typical scenario we often see is continuous deployment during the development stage. Every new change ends up there once it's completed and builds. Deploying to the next phase doesn't always occur multiple times but only at night. When designing your release strategy, choose your triggers carefully and consider the required release cadence. Some things we need to take into consideration are: What is your target environment? Does one team use it, or do multiple teams use it? If a single team uses it, you can deploy it frequently. Otherwise, it would be best if you were a ...

A release pipeline takes artifacts and releases them through stages and finally into production. The first component in a release pipeline is an artifact: Artifacts can come from different sources. The most common source is a package from a build pipeline. Another commonly seen artifact source is, for example, source control. A manual trigger, where people start to release by hand. A scheduled trigger, where a release is triggered based on a specific time. A continuous deployment trigger, where another event triggers a release. For example, a completed build. Furthermore, a release pipeline has a trigger: the mechanism that starts a new release. A trigger can be: Another vital component of a release pipeline is stages or sometimes called environments. It's where the artifact will be eventually installed. You can have many stages (environments); part of the release strategy is finding the appropriate combination of stages. Another component of a release pipeline is approval. People ...

Azure DevOps has extended support for pipelines as code (also called YAML pipelines) for continuous deployment and started introducing various release management capabilities into pipelines as code. Feature YAML Classic Build Classic Release Notes Agents Yes Yes Yes Specifies a required resource on which the pipeline runs. Approvals Yes No Yes Defines a set of validations required before completing a deployment stage. Artifacts Yes Yes Yes Supports publishing or consuming different package types. Caching Yes Yes No Reduces build time by allowing outputs or downloaded dependencies from one run to be reused in later runs. In Preview, available with Azure Pipelines only. Conditions Yes Yes Yes Specifies conditions to be met before running a job. Container jobs Yes No No Specifies jobs to run in a container. Demands Yes Yes Yes Ensures pipeline requirements are met before running a pipeline stage. Requires self-hosted agents. Dependencies Yes Yes Yes Specifies a requirement that must be me...

T o understand the concepts and the technical implementation in many tools, you need to know how tool vendors define the difference between a release and a deployment. A  release  is a package or container containing a versioned set of artifacts specified in a release pipeline in your CI/CD process. It also includes a snapshot of all the information required to carry out all the tasks and activities in a release pipeline, such as: The stages or environments. The tasks for each one. The values of task parameters and variables. The release policies such as triggers, approvers, and release queuing options. On the other hand,  Deployment  is the action of running the tasks for one stage, which results in a tested and deployed application and other activities specified for that stage. Starting a release starts each deployment based on the settings and policies defined in the original release pipeline. There can be multiple deployments of each release, even for one stage. ...