Release Management planning update - 2016 H2

This post details plans for 2016 H2, focusing on simplifying application deployment in Release Management. Key enhancements include agent-based deployment to machine groups, which will deprecate the current concept of machine groups in the Test Hub and introduce a more robust multi-machine deployment capability by installing agents directly on target servers. This will simplify prerequisites, improve scalability for rolling and canary deployments, ease Linux server deployment, and provide better traceability. Azure deployments are being simplified by using ARM endpoints, webdeploy, tokenization, and integrating continuous deployment from the Azure portal. Support for Docker and Windows container deployments is planned via Marketplace extensions. Release orchestration will be enhanced with manual intervention steps, meta-tasks for reusable task sequences, folders and favorites for organizing release definitions, and audit history for releases. Package management integration will be expanded to support consuming feeds from package management services and direct deployment from code repositories like Git and TFVC.