Q:

Azure DevOps - User triggering release as approver

We have a CI/CD setup in Azure DevOps that gets triggered from push on master branch. Is it possible to make the approver the user that was the cause of the build trigger? 

The idea behind this is that we have many developers in our team so I want the specific dev that pushed changes make the decision on whether or not they want the changes deployed, vs. a dedicated approver.

A:

While I totally agree with @Daniel Mann on why this shouldn't be done, the way I've seen it happen is that the Team is assigned as the recipient of the approval request, and the user requesting a release or deployment should not approve it checkbox remains unchecked.
Then to avoid the inbox noise of the approval request, turn off the notification for the team about pending release approvals.

EDIT
If you must have only that one person assigned as the valid user to approve changes for deployment, you could do this too, but it wouldn't be pretty. You could have a "stage" per person. These stages would use artifact filters in the pre-deploy conditions to only send approval email to the person that stage is for. 

After the approval it forwards to the actual deployment stage to do the work. 

Now you need to add the username or something as the tag on the build. I'm unsure if there's a tool/task to do this as part of the build pipeline to keep it continuous, but I know you could figure out how to do it from the REST api. Perhaps you would need to create a pre-approval stage that runs a PS script to access the REST api and tag the provided build with the value of requestedBy property on the build.
Again, see how hard it is to do this? That probably means you're not following best practices. "Make the right things easy and the wrong things hard." -Unknown 

