pipelines

Stages, jobs, steps, and a pool that supplies the machine. The piece that decides most real designs is the agent pool, because Microsoft-hosted agents cannot reach a private network and most enterprise deployments need to.

The code did not change, the data did. That inverts what triggers the pipeline, what the tests assert, and what a rollback means.

The training part is a job. Everything around it is the pipeline: data snapshots that are immutable, an evaluation gate with a threshold set in advance, and adapters versioned so a bad one is a routing change away from gone.

Nobody is waiting, which changes every constraint. Latency stops mattering, throughput per dollar becomes the only metric, and the design converges on something that looks like a data pipeline rather than a service.