Create Release Pipeline for ADO

An artifact is a deployable component of your application. It is typically produced through a Continuous Integration or a build pipeline. Azure Pipelines releases can deploy artifacts that are produced by a wide range of artifact sources such as Azure Pipelines build, Jenkins, or Team City.

You define the release pipeline using stages, and restrict deployments into or out of a stage using approvals. You define the automation in each stage using jobs and tasks. You use variables to generalize your automation and triggers to control when the deployments should be kicked off automatically.

An example of a release pipeline that can be modeled through a release pipeline in shown below:

Artifacts in a pipeline and release

In this example, a release of a website is created by collecting specific versions of two builds (artifacts), each from a different build pipeline. The release is first deployed to a Dev stage and then forked to two QA stages in parallel. If the deployment succeeds in both the QA stages, the release is deployed to Prod ring 1 and then to Prod ring 2. Each production ring represents multiple instances of the same website deployed at various locations around the globe.