Software development ring build

It depends on how long it takes for you to complete all release validations successfully. A: The ring deployment model allows you to process a hotfix like any other change. The sooner you catch an issue, the sooner you can deploy a hotfix with no effect to downstream rings. A: Refer to Default and custom release variables. A: To safeguard cryptographic keys and other secrets used by your pipelines, see Azure Key Vault.

Skip to main content. This browser is no longer supported. Download Microsoft Edge More info. Contents Exit focus mode. Is this page helpful? Please rate your experience Yes No. Any additional feedback? Tip Publish your extension as private , to control exposure to invited users.

Tip Start with high-level views of your data, visual dashboards that you can watch from afar and drill-down, as needed. Submit and view feedback for This product This page. View all page feedback. One is service-based, the other project based. When it comes to deployments, having manual steps in the process usually impedes update velocity.

A "red button" strategy is better when that is your goal. The purpose of the Preview ring is to evaluate the new features of the update. It's not for broad parts of the organization but is limited to the people who are responsible for knowing what is coming next, generally IT administrators. Ultimately, this phase is the time the design and planning work happens so that when the public update is shipped, you can have greater confidence in the update.

Being part of the Windows Insider Program gives you early access to Windows releases so that you can use Insider Preview builds in your Preview ring to validate your apps and infrastructure, preparing you for public Windows releases. The Preview ring users are the most tech savvy and resilient people, who will not lose productivity if something goes wrong.

In general, these users are IT pros, and perhaps a few people in the business organization. Remember, you are working with pre-release software in the Preview ring and you will be evaluating features and testing the update for a targeted release. If you are using Windows Insider pre-release releases for your preview ring and you are using WSUS or Windows Update for Business, be sure to set the following policies to allow for Preview builds:.

The purpose of the Limited ring is to validate the update on representative devices across the network. During this period, data, and feedback are generated to enable the decision to move forward to broader deployment. Desktop Analytics can help with defining a good Limited ring of representative devices and assist in monitoring the deployment.

The most important part of this phase is finding a representative sample of devices and applications across your network. If possible, all hardware and all applications should be represented, and it's important that the people selected for this ring are using their devices regularly in order to generate the data you will need to make a decision for broader deployment across your organization. Ensure you monitor for sufficient adoption within this ring, because your Limited ring represents your organization across the board, and when you achieve sufficient adoption, you can have confidence that your broader deployment will run more smoothly.

In most businesses, the Broad ring includes the rest of your organization. Code review picks up where the automated tests left off, and are particularly good at spotting architectural problems. Manual code reviews ensure that more engineers on the team have visibility into the changes and that code quality remains high.

Once all the build policies are satisfied and reviewers have signed off, then the pull request is completed. This means that the topic branch is merged into the main integration branch, main. After merge, we run additional acceptance tests that take more time to complete. These are more like traditional post-checkin tests and we use them to perform an even more thorough validation.

This gives us a good balance between having fast tests during the pull request review while still having complete test coverage before release. Now that you have a firm understanding of the general workflow of a developer contributing code into the repo, let's discuss some of the key implementation details. A very popular trunk-based development release flow used by many organizations is GitHub Flow.

It provides a great starting point for organizations looking to implement a reasonably scalable approach to Git.

However, some organizations may find that as their needs grow, it's necessary to diverge from parts of the GitHub Flow. For example, an often overlooked part of GitHub Flow is that pull requests are actually delivered directly to production to test them before they're merged into main.

This means that developers need to wait in the deployment queue to test their changes before they can merge their pull requests. Some teams have several hundred developers working constantly in a single repository, and can complete over pull requests into main per day. If each of those pull requests required a deployment to multiple Azure data centers across the globe, our developers would lose time waiting in the queue to deploy their branches instead of writing software.

Instead, we continue developing in our main branch and batch up deployments into three week blocks, aligned with our sprint cadence. Different teams opt for different strategies when it comes to managing their Git repositories. For some teams, the majority of their code is in one Git repository. Code is broken up into components, which each live in their own root-level folder.

Really large components, especially older components, may be made up of multiple subcomponents. Those subcomponents get separate sub-folders within the parent component. Some teams also manage a few adjunct repositories, as well. Configuration changes are checked into a separate repository. A handful of other packages that team depends on come from other places and are consumed via NuGet. While some teams elect to have a single monolithic repository the mono-repo , other products at Microsoft use a multi-repo approach.

Skype, for instance, has hundreds of small repositories that get stitched together in various combinations to create their many different clients, services, and tools. Especially for teams embracing microservices, multi-repo can be the right approach. Usually older products that began as a monolith end up finding a mono-repo approach to be the easiest transition to Git, and their code organization reflects that. Our release flow lets us keep main buildable at all times and work from short-lived topic branches.

When we're ready to ship, whether that's a sprint or a major update, we start a new release branch off main. Release branches never merge back to main , so we require cherry-picking important changes. In the diagram below, short-lived branches are shown in light blue and the release branches are shown in dark blue.

One branch with a commit that needs cherry-picking is shown in red. We use a couple of Git branching features to help enforce this structure and keep main clean. Branch policies prevent direct pushes to main.

We require a successful build including passing tests , signoff by the owners of any code that was touched, and a handful of external checks verifying corporate policies before a pull request can be completed. We also like to keep our branch hierarchy tidy. We use permissions to block creation of branches at the root level of the hierarchy.

Within this structure, how do engineers actually get their daily work done? Obviously the environment's going to vary heavily by team and by individual. Some people like the command line, others like Visual Studio, and others work on different platforms. But the structures and policies in place on our repository ensure a solid and consistent foundation. Let's walk through a handful of common tasks. Our first stop has to be building a new feature.

That's the core of a software engineer's job, right? We'll skip past the non-Git parts like looking at telemetry data, coming up with a design and a spec, and even writing the actual code. Let's jump right in to working with the repository. The engineer starts by syncing to the latest commit on main. We keep main always buildable, so this is virtually guaranteed to be a good starting point.