Preview of Power Platform Pipelines: Comprehensive Guide

Michel Mendes [MVP] presented a comprehensive overview of the emerging functionality in Power Platform namely, Power DevOps (or pipelines in Power Platform)

pipelines aim to democratize application lifecycle management (ALM) for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 users, presenting a more straightforward ALM automation, and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD). The pipeline features make them more accessible to makers, admins, and developers. By leveraging these features, complex tasks that initially required significant effort and knowledge to harness ROI can be significantly reduced.

Pipelines offer minimal setup times and an intuitive yet powerful user experience for deploying solutions. For professional software developers, they provide a platform to extend and run pipelines using the Power Platform command line interface (CLI).

Pipelines confer several benefits to admins. They offer a lower total cost of ownership and improve the productivity of makers, developers, and admins. Pipelines speed up the process of bringing business solutions to the market and minimize the effort required to implement change management processes across an organization or team. More about Power DevOps

The solution also offers out-of-the-box solutions for compliance, safety, monitoring, and automation goals. These include customizable and easily accessible audit logs as well as deeper visibility through out-of-the-box analytics provided by a centralized location. The pipelines also allow for custom tailoring, extensibility, integration with Power Automate and for analytical purposes, Power BI reports.

Once pipelines have been set up, makers can initiate in-product deployments directly within their development environments. These deployments are pre-validated against the target environment to prevent mistakes and improve success rates.

Pipelines are not just beneficial to makers and admins alone but also professional developers. Through pipelines, developers can execute complex operations in the background, instructing the system what they want to accomplish instead of having to manually execute various underlying tasks. They can also extend pipelines and integrate with other CI/CD tools.

Pipelines support deployment of solutions as well as necessary configurations, connections, and environment variables for target environments. However, they currently do not support Power BI Dashboards (preview), Power BI Datasets (preview), and standalone licenses are required for their usage.

Pipelines function in tandem with other tools like Azure DevOps, GitHub, or the ALM Accelerator to ensure a robust and simple user experience. For advanced ALM scenarios, the ALM Accelerator is considered a more favorable choice. The ALM Accelerator functionality is robust, malleable, and can adapt to diverse ALM requirements.

Pipelines in a Broader Context

In recent years, the deployment of software solutions has changed drastically. With platforms such as Microsoft Power Platform, developers and non-developers alike have access to robust tools for creating business applications. Power DevOps, a new functionality within Power Platform, offers a suite of in-built deployment features that seamlessly fit into native product experiences, simplifying lifecycle management. They leverage user-friendly tools for teams to better manage and accelerate software development processes, making businesses more productive and reducing the total cost of ownership. Power DevOps are a testament to how Microsoft continues to innovate and adapt its platforms to meet the ever-evolving landscape of software development.

Read the full article Power Platform Pipelines: now in Preview

Learn about Power Platform Pipelines: now in Preview

For those seeking to expand their knowledge on Microsoft's Power DevOps, the preview of the Power Platform Pipelines is a must-understand aspect. Essentially, these pipelines democratize the application lifecycle management (ALM) for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 customers. They introduce ALM automation and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) capabilities in a user-friendly way for all users including makers, admins and developers. To get a grip of this knowledge, consider enrolling in concise yet comprehensive training courses or webinars hosted by renowned Microsoft experts.

In a nutshell, Power Platform Pipelines reduce the effort and domain knowledge necessary for adoption of healthy, automated ALM processes. Features such as automated deployment configuration, a user-friendly experience for solution deployment and the option for professional developers to extend pipelines using Power Platform command line interface (CLI), are some of the benefits offered.

• Consider engaging in hands-on practice to understand Configuring automated deployment pipelines, which can be grasped in just minutes.
• Engage with community forums or Q&A sessions for queries on the process of centrally managing pipelines which allows admins to oversee citizen-led and pro-dev-led projects at scale with minimal effort.

It is important to note that Power Platform Pipelines offer enhanced productivity for makers, developers, and admins. They allow business solutions to come to market faster, maintain high quality, and stay governed through a safe process. Areas in these subjects are rich for deep-dives in knowledge enhancement.

Usage of preconfigured pipelines by makers is another topic of interest. With pipelines already in place, makers can conveniently initiate in-product deployments directly within their development environments, without requiring prior knowledge of ALM processes or systems. Comprehension of these subjects is crucial, and one can familiarize with these topics by engaging in simulation exercises and practical drills offered in training modules.

Moreover, Power Platform Pipelines also ease the work for professional developers by automated complex background operations. Developers are freed to focus on the more essence of their work like achieving the functional requirements rather than the "how" to achieve it. Hence, it is highly beneficial for developers to delve into an in-depth study of using and extending pipelines via platforms like online courses, webinars, and tutorials.

Lastly, grasping the importance and essence of Power Platform Pipelines would be incomplete without the understanding of FAQs about them. These range from understanding what pipelines deploy, to their role in facilitating environment management, and various licencing questions. Comprehensive learning platforms offer deep dives into these discussions and lead to a prolific understanding of the subject by answering all possible queries.

To summarise, Power Platform Pipelines present a watershed moment in enhancing operational efficiency within the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem. Familiarizing with them is going to be incredibly beneficial in streamlining workflows within your organisation.

More links on about Power Platform Pipelines: now in Preview

Automate deployments with pipelines in Power Platform ...

Dec 7, 2022 — Pipelines aims to democratize application lifecycle management (ALM) for Power Platform and Dynamics 365 customers by bringing deployment ...

Overview of pipelines in Power Platform

Sep 15, 2023 — Power BI Dashboards (preview) and Power BI Datasets (preview) are not currently supported in pipelines.

Keywords

Power Platform Pipelines, Preview, Microsoft, Data Management, Cloud Service, Power Platform Preview, Pipeline Design, Power Automate, Digital Transformation, Power Apps.