CI/CD & source control process using Git and VSTS

Question

We are trying get our CI/CD up and running and I was after some feedback on it.

We are using VSTS and building c# api + JavaScript applications.

We want to use VSTS build and Release management. The release management uses the idea of 'promotion' of the same build through the various environments.

Our process

1. We tend to use feature branches, which are then merged back into develop when good enough. Then our CI, picks up changes to the develop branch, triggers a build and the created artifacts are used for release.
2. The build happens on our premises build server, using a build agent looking at VSTS.
3. It is tested etc as it gets promoted through the environments, assuming tests etc pass.
4. Then when it was final approved to make it to production (by approval), we want it to update source control by merging into master + tag with the version that was deployed to production. So this means that the git merge is handled by a step late on in the release management.

Firstly, is this a decent setup for our start to CI/CD? Any suggestions to improve it? In particular the way the source control part is, but we want to make any aspect of it better.

Should we be merging to master earlier, and then only building our CI/CD from that? And use tags or something to denote releases which made it to production?

Thanks.

Note: Couldn't find a tag for VSTS.

Answer 1

A prerequisite for continuous deployment / delivery is continuous integration - i.e. the whole team merging changes onto a single centralized branch multiple times per day. It looks like this is exactly what you are doing on the develop branch, so the thing that looks odd to me is what is the point of the master branch? The thing that it seems to be doing is:

• keeping track of what's in production (which you can do with tags)
• you can branch from master if you need to hotfix production (in git you can branch from any commit / tag)

What you have described of your deploy / test process looks good, so I'd just rename develop to master and delete master.