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In the fast-paced world of DevOps, release pipelines play a critical role in automating the deployment process and ensuring the smooth delivery of code from development to production. Azure DevOps provides a comprehensive platform for building, testing, and releasing your applications efficiently. In this blog, we’ll guide you through the process of creating and configuring release pipelines in Azure DevOps, covering both build and release stages for a full deployment workflow. If you’re new to CI/CD concepts, make sure to check out my previous post, Ignite Your Azure DevOps Journey: The Ultimate Guide to CI/CD Mastery!, where I cover the foundational elements of CI/CD.

What is a Release Pipeline?

A Release Pipeline in Azure DevOps is a structured process that automates the steps involved in deploying application code to various environments, such as development, staging, and production. It allows teams to control when and how applications are deployed, helping to reduce manual intervention, increase reliability, and ensure consistency across environments.

Building a Release Pipeline: The Step-by-Step Process

Step 1: Creating a New Build Pipeline

Before setting up a release pipeline, you need a Build Pipeline to compile your code, run tests, and produce artifacts. Follow these steps to create a Build Pipeline:

1. Navigate to Pipelines in your Azure DevOps project.
2. Select New Pipeline and choose the repository where your code resides (Azure Repos, GitHub, Bitbucket, etc.).
3. Pick a build template based on your project type, for example, .NET Core, Node.js, or Python.
4. Customize the pipeline by adding tasks like compiling code, running tests, and generating artifacts.
5. Save and run the build pipeline to ensure it executes successfully.

At the end of this process, your build pipeline should produce the necessary artifacts (such as compiled code or packaged application) that can be deployed in the release pipeline.

Step 2: Creating a Release Pipeline

Once the build pipeline is ready, it’s time to configure the Release Pipeline.

1. Navigate to the Releases section under Pipelines and click New Release Pipeline.
2. Choose the appropriate template, or start from an empty job for a custom pipeline.
3. Link your artifacts from the build pipeline by clicking Add an artifact.
4. Define the stages where you want to deploy the code, such as Development, QA, Staging, and Production.
5. Add tasks to each stage based on your deployment needs, for example:
   • Deploy to Azure App Service
   • Deploy to Kubernetes
   • Run database migrations
   • Perform integrity checks

You can further configure pre- or post-deployment approvals to automate manual reviews before moving to the next environment.

Configuring Continuous Deployment (CD)

To streamline the deployment process, you can enable Continuous Deployment (CD) in Azure DevOps. This allows your release pipeline to automatically trigger whenever a new build is available. Here’s how:

1. Go to the Triggers tab in your Release Pipeline.
2. Enable the Continuous deployment trigger and specify the conditions.
3. You can also define branch filters to deploy only changes from a specific branch (e.g., master/main).

Approval Gates and Stages

Azure DevOps offers advanced control with approval gates. These gates ensure that manual intervention is required before a release moves to critical environments like production. You can configure:

• Pre-deployment approvals: Trigger approval before the deployment.
• Post-deployment approvals: Require manual approval after the deployment but before moving to the next stage.

These approvals can be configured to include different stakeholders, providing an extra layer of quality assurance.

Managing Variables in Release Pipelines

Using variables in your release pipeline can help parameterize values for environments or configurations. In Azure DevOps, you can define variables at various levels, including:

1. Pipeline-wide variables: Accessible in all stages and tasks.
2. Stage-specific variables: Relevant only for certain stages.
3. Variable groups: Reusable variable groups across multiple pipelines, especially useful for sensitive values like connection strings or API keys.

Handling Secrets and Secure Files

To manage sensitive information like passwords or tokens, Azure DevOps provides Azure Key Vault integration. You can securely store these values and use them during the pipeline execution. Alternatively, you can also mark variables as secret in the variable tab to ensure they are not exposed in the pipeline logs.

Advanced Deployment Strategies: Blue-Green and Canary Releases

Azure DevOps supports advanced deployment strategies like blue-green deployments and canary releases. These techniques help ensure zero-downtime deployments by routing a small percentage of live traffic to the new release (canary) or deploying to a duplicate environment (blue-green) before switching the entire workload.

1. Blue-Green Deployment: Create two identical environments (blue and green), switch traffic to the new version once deployment is successful.
2. Canary Deployment: Deploy the application to a small subset of users to monitor performance before rolling it out to all users.

Azure DevOps has built-in support for these strategies, allowing you to configure traffic splits and routing rules using Azure Load Balancer or Application Gateway.

Using YAML for Pipelines

While the UI-based pipelines are easy to configure, using YAML pipelines offers greater flexibility and version control. With YAML, you can define your pipeline as code, making it easier to maintain and reuse across different projects. You can set up both build and release pipelines in YAML, and store them alongside your source code in the repository.

Automating Infrastructure with Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Azure DevOps integrates seamlessly with Terraform, ARM templates, and Azure Bicep to automate infrastructure provisioning. With the Terraform task or ARM template deployment task, you can manage your infrastructure in the same pipeline as your code, ensuring that both application and infrastructure are deployed consistently.

Hands-On: Real-Time Project Deployment

Now that we’ve covered the concepts, let’s dive into a hands-on example of building and deploying a real-time project in Azure DevOps. Imagine you’re deploying a web application with a Node.js backend, hosted on Azure App Service. Here’s how the pipeline would look:

1. Build Pipeline:
   • Use the Node.js build template.
   • Add tasks to install dependencies, run unit tests, and package the application.
   • Generate a .zip artifact for deployment.
2. Release Pipeline:
   • Add an artifact linked to the Build Pipeline output.
   • Create stages for Development, QA, and Production environments.
   • Add Azure App Service Deploy tasks in each stage.
   • Set up manual approvals for staging and production environments.
   • Use pre-deployment conditions to check for successful deployment in the previous stage before promoting.
3. Continuous Deployment:
   • Enable triggers to deploy automatically when a new build is ready.
   • Integrate Azure Key Vault for securely managing environment variables like database connection strings and API keys.

Conclusion

Azure DevOps simplifies the process of building and deploying applications through its robust Pipelines and Release management features. Whether you’re using basic deployment models or advanced strategies like canary or blue-green, Azure DevOps offers all the tools you need for modern software development. By integrating approvals, secrets management, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC), you can ensure secure, efficient, and reliable deployments across all your environments.

By following the steps outlined in this blog, you’ll be able to build and configure a complete release pipeline that fits your project needs, ensuring the best practices of CI/CD in any development environment.

Read more on Azure’s official documentation here