Azure DevOps release pipeline triggered by existence of all (not any) of multiple artifacts?

Question

Azure DevOps release pipelines let me specify multiple input artifacts but automated triggering only happens for the primary artifact. Is there a way to do a 'wait all' type operation on N input artifacts so that my release pipeline only starts when each artifact has a version available that matches some specified value?

For instance, say I make a commit M in a repo which has multiple different CI jobs A and B which take very different amounts of time. One CI job (A) creates a NuGet package as an artifact in minutes, the other CI job (B) takes hours to create VM images. I want a release pipeline which will use the NuGet package and VM image as inputs. But if I simply use the latest version of A and B as an input artifact in a release pipeline with a CI trigger on the primary artifact (either A or B) then when the release triggers it could be using mismatched versions of artifacts as 10 NuGet packages from 10 different commits are complete before I even get 2 VM images made by the other CI pipeline. I thought maybe build/artifact tags could solve this so that my release waits for artifacts which all have the same tag but I can't use variables in build/artifact tag filters which makes this not really amendable to any sort of automated scheduled/trigger.

Is this some good pattern for this type of workflow?

Answer 1

For this issue , based on your workflow, I am afraid that it is impossible to achieve a fully automated release. Enabling the Continuous deployment trigger will create a new release every time when a new build is available. Since the two artifacts are not generated at the same time, the two matching artifacts cannot be used as the source in automatic release.

To use specific artifacts as source in a release, we usually specify the version in Artifact. But this can't achieve continuous deployment. One way is to merge jobs A and B to generate an artifact, so that you don’t need to worry about the corresponding issues of artifacts, but according to your actual situation, I ’m not sure about the feasibility of this.

do a 'wait all' type operation on N input artifacts so that my release pipeline only starts when each artifact has a version available that matches some specified value

Apart from the negative answer, I think what you want is a good idea! So I post a feature request here in DC forum. You could vote that suggestion ticket and share your comment there.The product team would provide the updates if they view it. Thank you for helping us build a better Azure DevOps.