Azure DevOps Approval Gate For Parallel App Deployments

Question

I have CI set up in Azure DevOps so as soon as an artifact is changed, it is released to our 2 dev environments. This is done in parallel, so they both go out together. I'd like to put an approval action on this release to our Dev environments, which I have done, but suspect it is not the most efficient way. I have 2 options that I can see...

1. Put the 2 dev stages in series and use one of the stages as an approval gate.
2. Create a stage before the parallel deployments specifically for this approval and leave the deployments to be released in parallel.

I don't like no.1 because it means I have to wait until one is fully released and restarted before the second one is started (this issue is replicated on UAT and Live where there are more environments)

So I have implemented No.2. Like so...

Here there is a stage (Development Gate) specifically for approval only (although approval is switched off in this pic)... but this stage has a job (which I cannot remove), which is wasting time and resources as it is set up... Can someone suggest a better way to make an approval gate for this scenario?

Thanks

Answer 1

But this stage has a job (which I cannot remove), which is wasting time and resources as it is set up

You can add an agentless job to your Development Gate stage and remove the agent job. Since no task is added to the agentless job, it will succeed immediately and will not waste time and resources.