Shashank Bansal

Azure Pipelines enable you to continuously build, test and deploy to any platform or cloud. This plugin connects Jira Software with Azure Pipelines, enabling full tracking of how and when an issue is delivered.

In DevOps ecosystem, choice of systems and collaboration between cross-functional teams is critical. Incidence response and change management are key DevOps activities. ServiceNow is a market leader for IT service management, and we are delighted that Azure Pipelines and ServiceNow have partnered together for an integration of Azure Pipelines with ServiceNow Change Management.

We are excited to announce that release gates are now generally available to all VSTS users and accounts so everyone can now add progressive exposure to their continuous delivery pipelines.
What are release gates
If you haven’t tried them yet,  Release gates enable data-driven approvals for phased deployments with VSTS based on monitoring of deployment health through the pipeline. 

Continuous monitoring is an integral part of safe deployments and DevOps pipelines. Ensuring the application in a release is healthy after deployment is as critical as the success of the deployment process. Enterprises adopt various tools for automatic detection of application health in production and for keeping track of customer reported incidents.

When you are configuring continuous deployment pipelines for your team, it becomes essential to keep the team members informed about the progress of releases and the related action items.
We had started preview of the release notifications feature that integrates the configuration of release related notifications with the default notification settings experience in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) a few months back.

Note: If you do not see the preview feature on your account, kindly leave a comment to this blog with your team services account name.
There are multiple stakeholders for a release. Whether the team is small or large, keeping the right stakeholders informed about how releases are progressing and what actions are required.

Azure Government clouds provide private and semi-isolated locations for specific Government or other services, separate from the normal Azure services. Highest levels of privacy have been adopted for these clouds, including restricted data access policies.

Azure Government clouds require unique Azure endpoints to manage the services offered there.

For large and high scale applications, the promise of “enterprise grade” availability and high reliability levels are key to customer confidence on the applications. Continuous delivery pipelines for such scaled out applications typically consist of multiple environments.
DevOPS enables faster &

Background
Build and Release services are available with Visual Studio Team Services and Team Foundation Server 2015.
Both these services rely on a set of tasks that are used to define build steps or deployment tasks.
A set of out of the box tasks are provided from the system.

When a deployment fails, it is likely to leave an environment in an unhealthy state. A rollback strategy is required to get the environment back to a healthy state.
There are various options that can be considered as a rollback strategy.