Today we are excited to announce the general availability of Release Management in Visual Studio Team Services. Release Management is available for Team Foundation Server 2017 as well.
Since we announced the Public Preview of Release Management, we have been adding new features continuously and the service has been used by thousands of customers whose valuable feedback has helped us improve the product.
Release Management is an essential element of DevOps that helps your team continuously deliver software to your customers at a faster pace and with high quality. Using Release Management, you can automate the deployment and testing of your application to different environments like dev, test, staging and production. You can use to deploy to any app platform and target On-Premises or Cloud.
Release management works cross-platform and supports different application types from Java to ASP.Net and NodeJs. Also Release Management has been designed to integrate with different ALM tools as well to customize release process. For example, you can integrate Release Management with Jenkins and Team City builds or you can use Node.js sources from Github as artifacts to deploy directly. You can also customize the deployments by using the automation tasks that are available either out of the box or write a custom automation task/extension to meet your requirements.
Automated deployments
You can design and automate release pipelines across your environments to target any platform and any application by using Visual Studio Release Management. You can trigger release as soon as the build is available or even schedule it. Automated pipeline helps you to get faster time to market and respond with greater agility to customer feedback.
Manual or automated gates for approval workflows
You can easily configure deployments using pre or post deployment approvals – completely automated to dev/test environments and manual approvals for production environments. Automatic notifications ensure collaboration and release visibility among team members. You get full audit-ability of the releases and approvals.
Raise the quality bar with every release
Testing is essential for any release. You can ship with confidence by configuring testing tasks for all of your release check points – performance, A/B, functional, security, beta testing and more. Using “Manual Intervention” you can even track and do manual testing in the automated flow.
Deploying to Azure is easy
Release Management makes it very easy to configure your release with built in tasks and easy configuration for deploying to Azure. You can deploy to Azure Web Apps, Docker containers, Virtual Machines and more. You can also deploy to a range of other targets like VMware, System Center Virtual Machine Manager or servers managed through some other virtualization platform.
End to end traceability
Traceability is very critical in releases, you can track the status of releases and deployments including commits and work items in each environment.
Refer to documentation to learn more about Release Management.
Try out Release Management in Visual Studio Team Services.
For any questions, comments and feedback – please reach out to Gopinath.ch AT microsoft DOT com.
Thanks
Gopinath
Release Management Team
Twitter: @gopinach