Our release pipelines in Azure DevOps 2025 suddenly started failing across multiple projects. The deployments were working fine until last week when we updated our environment security settings and restructured our service connection RBAC permissions.
The error appears during the deployment stage:
Error: ##[error]The service connection does not have sufficient permissions
Deployment to environment 'Production' failed
Job: Deploy_Application failed with exit code 1
We’ve verified the deployment group permissions look correct in the UI, but the pipeline still can’t access the target servers. Our security team recently enabled Entra ID conditional access policies which might be interfering. The pipeline runs fine in lower environments but blocks production deployments completely.
Has anyone encountered this after updating environment security or service connections? What permissions are actually required for release-planning pipelines to work with secured environments?
Go to Pipelines > Environments > [Your Environment] > Security. There you can add your service connection’s service principal as a user with Administrator role. You’ll need to search for it by the application ID of the service principal. Also check the deployment group settings under Pipelines > Deployment groups to ensure the agent pool identity has the right permissions on the target machines.
We had similar failures after enabling conditional access. The service principal backing your service connection needs to be added to the Entra ID exclusion group for automated deployments. Also verify the deployment group agent pool has the correct permissions - it needs ‘User’ role minimum on the environment. Check your pipeline YAML to ensure it references the environment correctly with the environment: Production syntax.
Don’t forget about the resource authorization settings. In your environment configuration, you need to explicitly authorize which pipelines can deploy to it. Even with correct RBAC, if the pipeline isn’t in the authorized list, it will fail with permission errors. Check under Environment > Approvals and checks > Pipeline permissions.