Azure Pipelines is a cloud-based continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) service provided by Microsoft as part of the Azure DevOps suite. It enables development teams to automate the build, test, and deployment of their applications to various targets, such as cloud platforms, on-premises servers, or other environments.

Key features of Azure Pipelines include:

1. Build Automation: Azure Pipelines can automatically build your code from repositories like GitHub, Azure Repos, or Bitbucket. It supports multiple programming languages and platforms, allowing you to compile and package your application efficiently.

2. Release Management: The service facilitates automated deployment to various environments, including staging and production, with customizable release pipelines. This allows you to deliver software rapidly and reliably.

3. Continuous Integration: With Azure Pipelines, you can set up CI workflows that trigger builds automatically whenever code changes are pushed to the repository. This helps catch issues early and maintain code quality.

4. Continuous Deployment: The service supports continuous deployment, enabling you to automatically release your application to target environments after successful builds and tests.

5. Flexible Agent Support: Azure Pipelines offers hosted agents with various pre-installed software and tools for common build and deployment tasks. Additionally, you can set up your self-hosted agents to meet specific requirements.

6. Integration and Extensibility: Azure Pipelines can be easily integrated with various development and deployment tools, including popular version control systems, issue trackers, and cloud providers. It also supports custom extensions to extend its capabilities.

7. YAML-based Pipelines: Azure Pipelines allows defining CI/CD pipelines using YAML, which provides a version-controlled and code-based approach to pipeline configuration.

8. Multi-Platform and Multi-Cloud: Azure Pipelines can target a wide range of platforms, including Windows, Linux, macOS, and various cloud services like Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.

9. Security and Compliance: The service comes with built-in security features, access controls, and compliance measures to ensure that your software development and deployment process adheres to industry standards.

Azure Pipelines is widely used by developers and DevOps teams to streamline their development processes, improve code quality, and deliver applications faster and more reliably. It is a powerful tool for automating the end-to-end software development lifecycle.