Question

Your team deploys a payment microservice through an Azure Pipelines multi-stage YAML pipeline. Leadership requires that promotion from the 'Staging' stage to the 'Production' stage must be blocked automatically if there are any active Azure Monitor alerts on the staging environment AND if there are unresolved 'blocking' bugs recorded in Azure Boards. The check must re-evaluate periodically and only allow promotion once both conditions clear, without requiring a human to manually click approve. Which mechanism should you configure on the Production stage's environment?

Accepted Answer

Configure release gates using the 'Query Azure Monitor alerts' check and the 'Query Work Items' check, with a defined evaluation interval and timeout.

Answer

Add a manual approval check that lists the release manager as the approver.

Answer

Add a Business Hours check so the deployment only proceeds during a maintenance window.

Answer

Add an Exclusive Lock check to serialize deployments to the Production environment.