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Azure Pipelines Approvals and Checks Scalability

13 posts · Apr 2014 – Jun 2023

What this trail covers

Azure Pipelines enhances multi-stage YAML pipelines with new resource types (pipelines, ACR containers) for triggering and traceability. It introduces canary deployment strategies for AKS using Service Mesh Interface (SMI) for more accurate traffic splitting, and rolling deployments for Virtual Machines (private preview). Pipeline Artifacts and Pipeline Caching are now generally available, improving build output storage and reducing build times by reusing dependencies. This post introduces Environments and deployment strategies for CD in YAML, along with Kubernetes integration.

All Microsoft trails
  1. Updates to Approvals and ChecksThis post details changes to enforce scalability for Invoke Azure Function & REST API checks in Azure Pipelines. It defines compliance rules for synchronous (ApiResponse) and asynchronous (Callback) modes, focusing on the ratio of timeout to time-between-evaluations for synchronous checks and requiring time-between-evaluations to be 0 for asynchronous checks. A three-phase rollout plan is outlined, starting with warnings and progressing to brownouts and failures for non-compliant checks. Experience improvements include making check logs more accessible for compliant checks and displaying instructions to approvers.
  2. I need manual approvers for GitHub Actions!!!! And I got them now :)This post details the introduction of manual approvers (required reviewers) and environment-specific secrets for GitHub Actions. It explains how to configure these features through the GitHub UI by creating new environments and setting protection rules, and how to reference these environments in YAML workflows to enforce manual approval steps before deployments to production or other critical environments. The post also highlights the visual representation of these approval steps in the GitHub Actions workflow graph.
  3. Announcing General Availability of YAML CD features in Azure PipelinesAnnounced the general availability of multi-stage YAML CD features in Azure Pipelines. This includes the ability to define CI/CD workflows in a single YAML file, introducing stages with dependency graphs, resources (pipelines, builds, repositories, containers, packages), environments (Kubernetes, VMs), and approvals/checks on resources. Also highlighted review apps for pull request collaboration and a refreshed UX for service connections with configurable approvals and checks.
  4. What’s new in Azure DevOps Sprint 160This post details several new features in Azure DevOps Sprint 160 related to pipeline and deployment management. Key contributions include: 1. ReviewApp for pull requests, enabling deployment of PRs to dynamic environments for service verification. 2. Advanced approval policies for YAML pipelines, offering more control over approvals (requester cannot approve, subset of users, timeout). 3. Azure Container Registry (ACR) as a first-class pipeline resource, allowing pipelines to be triggered by new image publications. 4. Orchestration of canary deployment strategies on Kubernetes environments for gradual rollouts.
  5. Review Apps in Azure PipelinesIntroduced the Review Apps feature in Azure Pipelines, which deploys every pull request (PR) from a Git repository to a dynamically-created Environment resource. This allows teams to preview changes in a PR, test them in the context of dependent services before merging to production, and improve developer productivity and application quality by enabling a 'shift left' approach. The feature is initially available for Kubernetes and integrates with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Dev Spaces.
  7. Improved Continuous Delivery capabilities and caching for Azure PipelinesIntroduced pipeline and Azure Container Registry (ACR) container resources for multi-stage YAML pipelines, enabling cross-pipeline artifact consumption and ACR image triggers. Enhanced AKS canary deployments with Service Mesh Interface (SMI) for request-level traffic splitting and added rolling deployments for Virtual Machines (private preview). Made Pipeline Artifacts and Pipeline Caching generally available.
  8. What’s new with Azure PipelinesIntroduced multi-stage YAML pipelines for both CI and CD, unifying the YAML experience. Added a new UI for visualizing multi-stage pipelines and an improved log viewing experience. Introduced 'Environments' to group resources (Kubernetes clusters, Azure Web Apps, VMs, databases) for traceability, deployment history, and future diagnostics/approvals. Introduced 'strategy' keyword for deployment strategies like 'runOnce', with future support for canary and blue-green deployments. Enhanced Kubernetes integration for building and deploying to clusters, with visibility into deployments and pod-level details within Environments. Added templates and an in-product editor with IntelliSense for YAML pipelines.
  9. Announcing Kubernetes integration for Azure PipelinesIntroduced automated CI/CD pipeline and Kubernetes manifest generation for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) based on repository analysis. Added a new "Deploy Kubernetes manifests" task with features like deployment strategies, artifact substitution, metadata annotation, manifest stability check, and secret handling. Enhanced Kubernetes service connection to support Service Account details, kubeconfig files, and Azure subscription details for AKS. Enabled hybrid and multi-cloud support for Kubernetes deployments using Service Accounts.
  10. Include ServiceNow Change Management in Azure PipelinesIntroduced the ServiceNow Change Management extension for Azure DevOps, enabling the addition of ServiceNow Change Management as a release gate in Azure Pipelines. This gate automates the creation of ServiceNow change requests before the production stage, pauses the pipeline until approval, and allows for updating the change request with deployment status. It also captures release information in the change request for traceability.
  11. What’s new in VSTS Sprint 134 UpdateRelease gates are now generally available, allowing for automated deployment progression between environments. Default gates include Query Work Items and Query Azure Monitor Alerts. The extensibility of release gates is highlighted, with examples of custom gates for Get Twitter Sentiment and Search GitHub Issues from the Marketplace.
  12. Changes in creating VSO Environments in Visual Studio IDEThis post details changes in the workflow for creating and managing environments in Visual Studio Online (VSO) and Visual Studio IDE. Previously, deploying an Azure Resource Manager template to an environment provisioned the Azure Resource Group, deployed the application, and registered it as an Environment in VSO. This environment could be shared, started, stopped, and its history tracked. The updated workflow now prefers 'Deploy to Resource Group' for application deployment to Azure Resource Groups, and users will encounter a 404 error if they attempt to deploy to an environment. The 'Environments' hub, previously in the Team Explorer of Visual Studio IDE, has been removed. Developers are now directed to the new Azure portal to view and manage environments, as they are backed by Azure Resource Groups. This change is a result of feedback aiming for consistency across VS IDE, Build, Test, and Release Management (RM) experiences, and a move towards supporting various cloud providers through the Team Web Access.
  13. Visual Studio Release Management 2013 Update 2 RC now availableIntroduced the ability to use 'tags' on servers to simplify deployment to groups of servers, allowing a single deployment sequence to be authored and run in parallel across all servers with a given tag. This eliminates the need to author the same deployment sequence on each server individually and simplifies maintenance when servers are added or removed from a tier. Also added new options to the Release Management command line tool (ReleaseManagementBuild.exe) for triggering releases from third-party systems, enabling continuous deployment without requiring TFS build specific information.