Part 34: Add Approval Process In Release Pipeline | Pre-deployment Conditions | Azure Devops

Hey Everyone,

A pipeline is made up of stages. A pipeline author can control whether a stage should run by defining conditions on the stage. Another way to control if and when a stage should run is through approvals and checks.

Pipelines rely on resources such as environments, service connections, agent pools, variable groups, and secure files. Checks enable the resource owner to control if and when a stage in any pipeline can consume a resource. As an owner of a resource, you can define checks that must be satisfied before a stage consuming that resource can start. For example, a manual approval check on an environment would ensure that deployment to that environment only happens after the designated user(s) has reviewed the changes being deployed.

A stage can consist of many jobs, and each job can consume several resources. Before the execution of a stage can begin, all checks on all the resources used in that stage must be satisfied. Azure Pipelines pauses the execution of a pipeline prior to each stage, and waits for all pending checks to be completed. Checks are re-evaluation based on the retry interval specified in each check. If all checks are not successful until the timeout specified, then that stage is not executed. If any of the checks terminally fails (for example, if you reject an approval on one of the resources), then that stage is not executed.

Approvals and other checks are not defined in the yaml file. Users modifying the pipeline yaml file cannot modify the checks performed before start of a stage. Administrators of resources manage checks using the web interface of Azure Pipelines.