The Stages area is where you define the logical destinations of your artifacts. The deployment destination can be a physical server, a cloud application, or a container orchestrator cluster, to mention just a few. You can create as many stages as you wish, based on the representation of your environment; for example, a stage for the Production environment, another stage for the Staging environment, and another for a Test environment. You can create a stage as independent, or create it as being dependent on another stage. You can also specify restrictions on stage deployment so that it will only execute if it receives approval from a list of users, and if a collection of conditions called gates are satisfied. For example:

1. You can add a REST API call that makes sure that your service deployment on the staging succeeded and that the service is operational before it is deployed to the production environment:

2. When you selected the release pipeline Azure App Service deployment template, a default stage was created for you that contains a single task which executes the deployment to Azure App Service.
3. Click on the stage tasks link to navigate to the stage tasks and configure the Azure account information:

4. On the tasks definition screen, you can add the tasks that will be executed as part of your pipeline. Select the Deploy Azure App Service task to enter the information needed to connect to your App Service:

5. Click the Save button to save the release pipeline.
6. Your release pipeline is currently configured to manual mode, and will only run on demand. Go back to the Releases page, select the release pipeline, and then click on the Create a release button to trigger a new release:

7. After you approve the release configuration and click on the Create button, a bar with the release information will appear:

8. Click on the release identifier (Release-1, for example) to see the executed release pipeline:

Congratulations, you now have an automated build and release pipelines!