TFS2017 Release Management Template Configuration tips

Question

Good Afternoon,

I'm a little new to the Release Management Department and I've been tasked with converting our Release Management 2013 templates over to 2017. I've ran into a road block recently that I've been unable to figure out how to proceed, and wanted to consult the experts for tips or suggestions.

The most major issue is that Release Management 2017 doesn't offer the ability to setup Environment Tags, meaning I can't setup a "Production" environment and tag all of our production IIS servers in it in order to run a single command against all the servers. This hinders me greatly.

I've done research on this issue and have come to two possible work arounds. Either 1) Creating a release template for each IIS Site or 2) Creating a Release Template for each Environment (Test/Stage/Prod). The problem here is that we managed over 100 different IIS Sites and Databases, so creating an individual template for each site would be...astronomical. Whereas creating one bulk template for each environment could lead to issues down the line if we needed to release a specific site.

I figure that we are not the only company that work with this many IIS Sites, and that someone has to have figured out a better solution that the two above. Do we need to look elsewhere other than TFS2017 (With built in RM Features)?

I appreciate any and all advice on the issue.

Answer 1

The tasks you'd be using to target your servers (such as "PowerShell on Target Machines") take a list of servers to execute against. You can store the server names in a variable on the release definition at the environment level.

In TFS 2017 Update 1, you'll be able to store related variables in variable groups and share them across release definitions.