Vijay Machiraju

Your continuous delivery pipeline typically consists of multiple environments. You may want to deploy changes first to a test or staging environment before deploying to a production environment. Furthermore, your production environment may itself comprise of multiple scale units, each of which you may deploy in parallel or one after the other for a gradual roll out.

[Update on  Nov 16, 2016] This article is now outdated. With the RTM version of TFS 2017, we have the final pricing model for Release Management. For more information, see our official documentation.
Since the new version of Release Management was introduced in TFS 2015 Update 2,

Now that we are done with a majority of items listed in our 2016 H1 plan, it is time to talk about our plans for 2016 H2. Most of the features listed below will first be available in VS Team Services,

[Update on 5 Apr 2016: This feature is now available again. You’ll need to install the External TFS Tools extension for it to work now. It is recommended to update any Release definitions that have been created using artifacts from an on-premises TFS server.]
[Update on 12 Feb 2016: This feature has been temporarily disabled in VSTS as it requires some more work.

With the release of Team Foundation Server 2015 Update 2 at //Build 2016, you get all the new Release Management (RM) features integrated right into TFS. The Release hub in the TFS web interface is your entry point to managing and tracking all of your application deployments.

We are rolling out a number of orchestration improvements in Release management service. These improvements are explained in the release notes here and here. One of the key features in this release is that you will be able to author more complex release definitions,

My colleague Abhishek Agarwal wrote a nice article on how the Release Management team dog-foods Release Management service as part of their development process. It is a good use case for how you can use RM for deploying and testing your applications on a daily basis (or for every check-in).

[Updated 5 Apr 2016]
Like what you see in the new Release Management service in VS Team Services and in TFS server? Are you currently using the rich client to connect to the previous version of Release Management service in VS Team Services or to an on-premises Release Management 2013 or 2015 server?

Today at Connect(), we announced the public preview of the new Release Management service in VSTS. This service helps you automate deployment of your application software to multiple environments all the way to production. You can deploy applications to your on-premises servers or to Azure and other cloud platforms.

Connect your Azure subscriptions to VSTS in 3 clicks
New improved user experience to setup Azure Resource Manager based service connection in VSTS.
Follow the post below to configure Visual Studio Team Services to communicate with Azure in order to provision or deploy Azure Resource Manager resources such as virtual machines

To setup Azure Service end point in VSTS,