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Showing posts from December, 2020

Make steps conditional in multi-stage YAML pipelines

To make the switch from the graphical release pipelines in Azure DevOps I am missing two features. The first one is to be able to defer a deploy and the second one is to exclude certain deployment steps without the need for editing the YAML file.  The defer option is something Microsoft has to solve in their Azure DevOps proposition. It's a feature which you have in the graphical release pipeline but what they have not implemented yet in their YAML pipeline replacement. Approvals and certain gate conditions are implemented on the environment but the defer option is still missing .  Pipeline The conditional deployment option can be implemented with the help of runtime parameters and expressions . In the parameter section you define boolean parameters which will control the deploy behavior. With the expressions you can control which stage/job/task should be executed when the pipeline runs. In the below YAML sample I experimented with conditions in the azure-pipelines.yml  file

Azure DevOps YAML based CD pipeline with multiple artifacts

In my post called " Switch from Azure DevOps release pipeline to YAML based CI/CD pipeline " I explained how to implement a combined CI/CD pipeline based on YAML templates. Because most of the deployments in my daily work are consuming multiple artifacts I had to do some additional R&D to find a solution for those releases in Azure DevOps. Base structure In the first post about the transition to YAML CI/CD pipelines I introduced the base structure. The templates I want to reuse are added to the yaml-template folders in the root of my GIT repo. For the CD pipelines which lack a CI phase I introduce a new folder called yaml-releases which will contain the YAML files for releases which are based on multiple artifacts. The folder structure within my GIT repo is thus: yaml-releases releaseArea myMultipleArtifactsRelease azure-pipelines.yml cd-job.yml yaml-templates jobs ... templates ...