An overview of release pipelines

Release pipelines permit you to implement the continuous delivery phase of a software life cycle. With a release pipeline, you can automate the process of testing and deliver your solutions (committed code) to the final environments or directly to the customer's site (continuous delivery and continuous deployment).

With continuous delivery, you deliver code to a certain environment for testing or quality control, while continuous deployment is the phase where you release code to a final production environment.

A release pipeline can be triggered manually (you decide when you want to deploy your code) or it can be triggered according to events such as a code commit on the master branch, after the completion of a stage (for example, the production testing stage), or according to a schedule.

A release pipeline is normally connected to an artifact store (a deployable component for an application and output of a build). An artifact store contains...