Set up fully automated, semi-automated, or on-demand pipelines with approvals to continuously deliver software to your customers at a faster pace with reduced risk.
Release Management is a service in Azure DevOps Services that helps
you automate the deployment and testing
of your software in multiple environments. Using Release Management, you
can either fully automate the delivery of your software all the way to
production, or set up semi-automated processes with approvals and
on-demand deployments. It is an essential element of DevOps that helps
your team continuously deliver software to your customers at a faster
pace and with lower risk, as well as improving efficiency and collaboration
between the teams that participate in release processes.
Release Management makes it easier to:
Deploy your applications regularly to any platform,
public or private cloud services, or App stores. Release Management
has many out-of-the-box tasks to deploy a variety of applications. If
you cannot find an out-of-the-box task to deploy your application
using Release Management, consider this: if you can script the
deployment of your application using Shell scripts or PowerShell scripts,
utilities such as Ant or Maven, batch files or EXE utilities, then
you can deploy it using Release Management. Release
Management also integrates with third party deployment systems
such as Chef and Docker.
Implement a Continuous Integration (CI) system for managing
delivery or release. Whether you use Team Build from Team Services or TFS, or
Jenkins as your CI system, you can set up Release Management to
automatically deploy new builds to multiple environments. Even if
we do not yet support integration with your favorite CI system or artifact
repository, you can still write custom tasks to download and
deploy artifacts from it.
Track the progress of releases.
If you use several environments for your tests, Release Management
helps you monitor whether a release has been deployed and tested on each
of these environments. Release Management also tracks whether an issue fixed
by a developer, or a product backlog item completed by your team, has
been deployed to a specific environment.
Maintain full and secure control of the deployments.
Release Management lets you specify which users can change the
configuration of an environment, or approve the release to be
deployed into a particular environment. If there is a problem with
your deployment, Release Management helps you roll back to a previous
deployment, and provide all the logs in one place to help you debug the
problem.
Get audit history for all releases and their deployments.
Release Management provides a history of all changes to the definitions,
configurations, and deployments. It also provides a history of all the
activity performed during each deployment. Each release is accompanied
by a listing of new features and developer commits that went into that
release.
