How to Employ Pipelines in Power Platform to Elevate Deployment Efficiency

Pipelines in Power Platform enhances Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) by leveraging ALM automation and Continuous Integration/ Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) capabilities for all users. It aims to simplify the process of deployment and reduce the efforts and domain knowledge required for healthy ALM process implementation.

Some of the benefits of pipelines for different stakeholders are:

Benefits for admins:

• Lower total cost of ownership and minimal effort to implement secure change management processes.
• Time and cost savings through automated processes and reduced maintenance.
• Scalability of ALM processes to accommodate evolving business needs.
• Improved productivity and promising quality.
• Helps to achieve Compliance and Safety Goals by:
• Secure production environments with approval-based delegated deployments.
• Customizations and audit logs are automatically saved and are easy to access.
• Out-of-the-box analytics provide better visibility within a central location.

Makers’ Benefits:

• No prior ALM knowledge is required for deployments.
• Pre-validated deployments prevent mistakes and improve success rates.
• Connections and environment variables are provided upfront, which ensures applications are deployed without manual post-processing steps.

Advantages for Developers:

• Increased productivity, as pipelines handle complex background operations.
• Simplified deployment process with the help of Power Platform Command Line Interface (CLI).
• No need to manually perform tasks such as exporting/importing solutions or creating connections.
• Extensibility options permit developers to integrate pipelines with other CI/CD tools for seamless automation.

The Key aspects of pipeline deployment are listed as follows:

• Solutions containing Power Platform customizations can be deployed via pipelines.
• Data stored within Dataverse tables is not included in the deployment process.
• Certain features, such as Power BI Dashboards and Datasets in preview, are not currently supported in pipelines.
• Deployments can include approval-based workflows for secure production environments.
• Pipelines are designed to work seamlessly with Azure DevOps, GitHub, and ALM Accelerator for more advanced ALM scenarios.
• Solutions backups are automatically stored for every deployment, which takes care of version control and rollback capabilities.
• While pipelines handle core deployment tasks, they can be extended to integrate with other CI/CD tools for complex workflows.

Conclusion

In summary, pipelines in Power Platform enable organizations to streamline their ALM processes. It enhances productivity and achieves compliance and safety goals. It democratizes organizations by catering to the needs of admins, makers, and professional developers.

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