Yesterday, Microsoft announced the availability of Visual Studio, Team Foundation Server (TFS), and Release Management 2013 Update 2 CTP 1. There are lots of great new features for Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server, but I want to focus on the new Release Management feature today.
Why do we need server tags?
With Update 2, Microsoft is adding the concept of server tags to Release Management. In previous versions of Release Management, if you had to deploy the same software with the same sequence of steps, you had to copy and paste the sequence to all of your target servers. It wasn't a big deal for a handful of servers, but it wasn't the smoothest experience when you were trying to deploy your application to dozens of servers simultaneously.
Here's how it might look for you today:
With server tags, you can define what "group" your servers belong to, and then set up one series of actions that runs on all of the servers that are part of that group. Let's look at how you do it!
How do they work?
First, under the Environmentstab, you open up your environment. In this example, I have 3 environments:
Here's how Dev looks:
As you can see, I have my one server, but I've assigned two tags to it: Database and Web. Tags are environment-specific, so I can define different groups of servers for each environment if I need to.
QA has each server in its appropriate tag:
And, of course, Production has four servers and two tags.
Then, under our Release Template, you can see that we have the tags we defined available to us! We can use the tags just like we used to use servers -- we can drag them into our Deployment Sequence, and then choose the actions that we want to execute on each member of the tag. The servers are still available if we need to do something that's specific to one server, of course!
That's all for today! You can download the CTP right now, but be aware that it's not a go-live CTP, so it shouldn't be installed on your production environments! According to Brian Harry, there will be more CTPs before the final release, hopefully with plenty of nifty new features for us! You can also read another great blog post from my colleague on the new Agile Planning features in Team Foundation Server Update 2 and learn more about our services and training on Release Management.
