AKS Environments and Release Pipeline

In Azure DevOps YAML pipelines, the environment: keyword allows us to define where your deployment happens and enables features like:

• Traceability between pipeline runs and deployed resources
• Approval gates before deployment
• Resource monitoring (especially for AKS)

Sample:

jobs:
- deployment: DeployToAKS
  environment: 'aks-prod.default'
  strategy:
    runOnce:
      deploy:
        steps:
        - task: KubernetesManifest@0
          inputs:
            action: deploy
            namespace: default
            manifests: |
              $(Pipeline.Workspace)/manifests/deployment.yml
              $(Pipeline.Workspace)/manifests/service.yml

aks-prod.default refers to an environment named aks-prod with a Kubernetes namespace default.