Sometimes you need to keep customer demo from test / dev environment and you don’t want anybody to update new version during your demo. Azure DevOps doesn’t have pause feature directly for release, but one neat way to implemented it, is to enable release gateway which holds release until you approve it. Good thing about using release gates is also that you won’t forget to re-enable release, because Azure DevOps will send an approval email when release is triggered.
Release gateways are enabled from pipeline trigger settings.
Pre-deployment approval with your name in Approvers list will stop all the releases until you approve them separately.
If someone tries to do the test environment update, Azure DevOps will send an email about approval and pend release until Approve button is clicked.
