Using "windows-latest" in releases pipelines

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Microsoft is deprecating Windows Server 2016 DevOps agent in November 2021 and will remove it in March 2022.

We have started to get warnings about this on our releases, pushing us to migrate.

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To prevent breakdowns in close future we would like to migrate ASAP but we have a large number of releases pipelines, so we would like to migrate agents on windows-latest as we do on build pipelines via YAML, mainly to not be bothered again about this.

However, this value doesn't seem to be available on release pipelines (despite being advised in the warning) :

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What are we missing ? Thank you for your help !

azure-pipelines-release-pipeline azure-devops
1 Answers

I suppose what you are missing is thorough and complete documentation from Azure DevOps. No surprise there.

I re-read the docs in order to provide a response, and it appears the main issue is that Classic pipelines are not in full parity with YAML pipelines. Classic pipelines simply do not have the option to always use the latest available image.

One thing that is a bit of a tangent but could solve multiple problems in your case is to implement self hosted build agents. That will; 1. buy you more time to make sure your releases actually work on the latest image; 2. leave you in control of what image is on the agent(s) for longer than the Nov 15th cut-off.

user_75127420
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