This an excerpt of an article written for Microsoft Tech Community Blog. To read the whole article click here
Introduction
This is part of a series on Azure DevOps pipelines, previously we discussed Azure DevOps Pipelines: tasks, jobs, and stages.
At this point you are familiar with core components of Azure DevOps pipelines (tasks, jobs, and stages) and are looking how to best leverage some additional components such as environments and variables.
Environments and variables are two key components when it comes to Azure DevOps pipelines security and governance. Additionally, if done right they assist with reusability of your pipelines.
Environments
Azure DevOps environments are defined as “a collection of resources that you can target with deployments from a pipeline”
They are much more than that though. Environments provide the ability to monitor deployments that are occurring, provide an additional level of security, and assist in tracking the state of work items in terms of where they have been deployed to.
Environments, like a lot of things withing Azure, is a very generic term.