Dynamics 365 Customer

Engagement - Continuous
Delivery

Microsoft Services
Module Overview
• What is Continuous Deployment/Delivery?
• Benefits
• Azure Pipelines for Releases
• Continuous Deployment for Dynamics
Continuous Deployment Health Check
• Are you shipping managed solutions?
• Is production being serviced while you work on v-next?
• Are you testing post-deployment? (Smoke test, UI test,
etc.)
What is Continuous Deployment/Delivery?
• Continuous Delivery (CD) is the process to build, test,
configure, and deploy from a build to a production
environment. 
• Successive environments support progressively longer-
running activities of integration, load, and user acceptance
testing.
Benefits
• Encourages configuration as code
• Minimizes the time to deploy
• Enables automated testing throughout the pipeline
• Makes deploying to production a low-stress activity
• Provides visibility and feedback cycles
• Time to mitigate incidents (TTM)
• Time to remediate incidents (TTR)
• With a faster release cadence hotfixes can become part
of the normal release cycle
Complete Deployment Flow Example
Incorporate hotfix
Feedback Gate deployments into Dev

Team Development 2
S
Gate Monitor

Release
SCM S
Stage
S S Gate

3
Keep pre-
Build
production
Stage Deploy
Just in environment
S
time intact for hotfixes Hotfix?

1
Create managed
solution artifact
Release Pipeline or Multi-Stage Pipelines?
• Release Pipelines can be created using the Classic Editor,
which segregates build and release in the UI and provides
two different experiences
• Using YAML based multi-stage pipelines the separation
between build and release processes is achieved by using
stages
• Stages may contain jobs or deployment jobs
• For YAML pipelines it is recommend that you put your deployment steps in a
deployment job.
• We will focus on the multi-stage pipeline approach
Jobs of the Release Stage
Job 1 - Deploy
• Download artifacts (managed solution zip file)
• Deploy solution(s)
• Gated deployments can be achieved using an environment with a check defined
• Configure environment

Job 2 – Test & Confirm

• Smoke test
• Review test results
Demo: Release
pipeline

Demonstrate functioning
release pipeline.
Lab: Create a
release pipeline
Knowledge Check
• What is continuous delivery?
• The process to build, test, configure, and deploy from a build to a
production environment.
• What are some of the benefits of CD?
• Minimize time to deploy, automated testing, low-stress deployments, reduced TTM,
reduced TTR, and reduces or eliminates the need to have hotfixes
Module Summary
• Continuous delivery enables us to deliver value to
customer at a faster pace and with improved consistency
• YAML based pipelines (Configuration as Code) allows
greater flexibility and enabled storing pipeline
configuration along side source code.
• Gated deployments allow teams to control the flow of
customizations to downstream environments
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