Approval policies can be put in place to meet your needs and bolster security. For example, you can use them to specify that the user who requested, initiated or created the release cannot approve it. When experimenting with approvals, unticking this option is a good idea to ensure that you can approve or reject your own deployments.

You can also use approval policies to force a revalidation of user identity or take recently changed permissions into account. Automatically approving subsequent prompts if the user has already approved the deployment to a previous stage of the pipeline is another useful tool within the approval policies, as it can help to cut down user workload. However, this only applies to pre-deployment approvals.

Of the two options, pre-deployment approvals are the most common simply because they are the most straightforward, and are very easy to implement. They work by granting a user or set of users permission to approve a stage of the Release Pipeline, meaning the stage will wait in a pending state until all of the designated users have given their approval. Once all users have given their approval, Azure DevOps can go ahead and release the build out into the production environment.

One of the key benefits of pre-deployment approvals is that they allow approvers to go in and manually verify whatever they need to in the Dev environment. This includes checking to make sure that all regression tests have passed and that no new bugs have appeared as a result of the build, and that the release has been internally approved for production.

Pre-deployment approvals are the go-to for most new Azure DevOps users, as they are so easy to set up. However, it’s important to put enough time aside to approve all actions manually, which can leave room for error if rushed. Especially in the early days, all information should be examined with a fine-toothed comb before approval.

Gates are another important factor involved in effective Azure deployment control. Within Azure DevOps, deployment gates are there to provide a way for you to automatically check that your new build is production-ready before deploying it to the production environment. As such, they can take over from some of the manual work approvers need to perform before certifying that a release is ready for the Production environment. Gates are evaluated in parallel before the release can proceed, and they can be run either before or after the required approvals are made.

Deployment gates are re-evaluated by default every 15 minutes and all gates must pass this evaluation before the release can go ahead. When a configurable amount of time passes without success, the release will fail.

When a group is specified as an approver, only one of the users within said group needs to approve deployment for the release to move forward. This process will differ slightly depending on which tool you use. If you are using Azure Pipelines, you can used local groups managed in Azure Pipelines or Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) groups. Meanwhile, if you’re using Team Foundation Server (TFS), you can use local groups managed in Team Foundation Server or Azure AD groups. The creator of a deployment is considered to be a separate user role for deployments. If no approval is granted within the specified Timeout, the deployment will be rejected.

Azure DevOps is just one of the products offered under the Microsoft Azure umbrella. As a solution, it provides item tracking, source control and release management that allows you to take control of your Release Pipelines. This is a powerful feature from DevOps that enables users to create pipelines to deploy builds out to designated server environments.

For example, if you were creating a Release Pipeline for your website and you have a separate environment for both Development (Dev) and Production – and both are hosted on Azure App Services – you can configure your Azure pipelines to ensure that code is automatically deployed to your Dev environment when checked in.

Meanwhile, if you also want to use the same build artefacts for your Dev and Production environments, it makes sense to put both environments in the same Release Pipeline. But there are still ways to control the release for each environment differently in this case. Azure DevOps allows you to validate the build in the Dev environment before releasing it to production, using pre-deployment approvals and deployment gates – more on those below.

Defining deployment approvals is important for gaining full control over your release pipelines. Deployment approvals can be defined at the start of a stage (pre-deployment approvers), at the end (post-deployment approvers), or both.

Pre-deployment approval requires you to choose the icon at the entry point of the stage and enable approvers, while post-deployment approvals include choosing the icon at the exit point of the stage. You can add multiple approvers at both stages, and these can be individual users or groups of users.

You have several options when adding gates to a Release Pipeline, in terms of how they can collect the data they need to evaluate. These include invoking an Azure Function or a REST API as part of your pipeline. You can also query Azure monitor alerts, which involves observing the configured classic Azure monitor rules for active alerts. There is also the option to query work items, which involves executing a work item query, checking for the number of items returned.

All of these options offer a wide spectrum of flexibility for a variety of scenarios during which gates can be useful. For example, if you wanted to check to make sure that no bugs are inhabiting the build in question, you can customise a work item query to find the bugs and then use the Query Work Items gate.

Deployment gates can be used in many different scenarios and for lots of different purposes, including incident and issues management, seeking approvals outside of Azure Pipelines, quality validation, security scans, changing management and evaluating overall infrastructure health.

There are a number of evaluation options which apply to all the gates you’ve added, allowing you to tailor the services and products to your build requirements. These include:

– The time interval between the successive re-evaluation of gates. At each sampling interval, new requests are sent to each gate and the new results are evaluated. Microsoft recommends making the sampling interval greater than the longest typical response time of the configured gate, as this will allow time for all responses to be received for evaluation.

– The timeout after which gates fail, also known as the maximum evaluation period for all gates. The deployment will be rejected if the timeout is reached before all of the gates pass during the same sampling interval.

– The order of gates and approval, which you can select if you’ve configured both. In pre-deployment conditions, the default will be to prompt for user approvals first and then evaluate gates afterwards. This is done to save the system from evaluating gate functions if the release has already been rejected by the user. In post-deployment conditions, the default if to evaluate gates first and prompt for manual approvals only if the gates are successful. This means that users have all the information they need to approve.

In short, gates allow for the automatic collection of signals from external services, using them to promote the release when all the signals are successful at the same time, or else stop the deployment if signals fail or timeout is reached. Gates can be used in connection with other Azure services such as incident management, problem management, monitoring, change management, external approval systems and more.

Both deployment gates and Azure Release Pipelines are important features within Azure DevOps, ones that Azure users should utilise when they need to exert control over their environment deployments. By gaining a greater understanding of Azure deployment control, you can take the necessary steps to getting the most out of all that Azure has to offer, making it work for you. And help is at hand for when you need support with Microsoft Azure deployment control, cost management or any other aspect of this popular cloud-based platform.

Microsoft Azure has become essential core service as businesses of all industries and sizes move to cloud but understanding how to ensure successful migration and long term ROI benefit from Azure requires sound planning and the use of the best tools and processes.

As your business grows and Azure usage increases, the effective control and management of Azure is the way to ensure success. This is where Syntax IT Support comes in.

At Syntax, we help clients to manage and control deployments on Azure through the use of the System Garden platform, the first comprehensive dynamic cloud control platform.

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Working with experts allows businesses to query Azure monitor alerts, deploy Azure services effectively, and maximise all that the software has to offer. By investing in the necessary support, you can futureproof both your release pipelines and your business budgets overall.

Making the most of Azure DevOps and other functions is particularly important for financial institutions and fintech companies, as these kinds of organisations often need to be FCA regulated. As such, they need to be able to demonstrate an ability to recover from a ransomware attack when prompted. One of the many strengths that Azure can provide for businesses is helping them achieve cybersecurity compliance, and this is also a benefit which is made even more robust with expert insight from Syntax.

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Tailoring your Azure pipelines allows you to get the most out of all of Azure’s capabilities.

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