Maker Deployment page

Makers can now view all their deployments in one place, regardless of solution or pipeline. If their deployment began from (or was deployed to) the current environment, they will be able to view the run history status of it. Failed Deployments and Active Deployments are highlighted in a convenient overview, so you don’t have to go looking for them either!

In addition to deployment visibility, we’ve included a Get started section that will evolve over time. For now, it will link to documentation to help a maker begin their journey to healthy application lifecycle management (ALM).

To further improve understanding of what healthy ALM looks like, we’ll soon be adding recommendations, where makers are alerted to resolve any potentially unhealthy ALM-related behavior, such as housing high-use apps outside of a solution.

Admin Deployment page

The Deployment page in the new admin center provides a streamlined experience to help administrators learn about, setup, and operation best-in-class ALM. The initial preview provides a central location to view all deployments in the tenant, approve deployment requests, and troubleshoot failures.

Select a pipelines host from the picker to see all the pipelines and deployment history managed with that host. A dedicated Failed deployments view helps admins quickly identify and troubleshoot failures and trending issues.

Admins can approve or reject deployment requests assigned to them. First setup Delegated deployments with service principals as the recommended way to deploy securely.

It is important that admins review changes in the solution and the sharing request. With the help of Copilot-generated deployment notes visible in the request, this becomes easier, but if you want a more granular look, be sure to set up Source control integration and link the repository to the approval.

Managed Operations

The Deployment pages are an offering of Managed Operations, allowing all who make or administrate to gain further insight into their Application Lifecycle Management to ensure that business solutions are reliable and performant in production. Aside from just deployment pipelines, these maker and admin experiences will evolve over the coming months and include many more Managed Operations intersections to take advantage of. So, stay tuned for more updates and please leave your feedback below!

Learn more

Admin Deployment page

Maker Deployment page

Managed Operations

New Power Platform Admin Center

The post Introducing Maker and Admin Deployment Pages appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

It just takes a few seconds to connect your Dataverse environment to Git. You can connect and use Git integration within Power Apps, Microsoft Copilot Studio, Power Automate, and Power Pages. You’ll also need access to an Azure DevOps Git repository.

Rollout is in-progress. Git integration is currently available in public geos outside the US. Your environment must be enabled for early access and accessed at https://make.preview.powerapps.com.

As the team develops, Dataverse tracks everyone’s changes. When ready, commit your changes to a branch in the connected Azure DevOps Git repository. A commit link is provided to view the changes within the repository and compare diffs. You’ll notice solutions and solution objects are now stored in human readable formats in the repo.

Professional developers can work in source control while others work in one or more environments. It’s easy to pull others’ changes into other development environments which are connected to the same source code location. This allows team members to build without others editing in their environment and share changes once they’re ready. Connect multiple development environments using the same repo, branch, and folder. Then, in each environment create or import an unmanaged solution with the same name and publisher.

When committing and pulling changes, conflicts may be detected – meaning someone else made conflicting changes to the same object. You’ll need to choose whether to keep the version that’s in your environment or bring the version from source control into your environment. You can also revert changes in the repository, then pull the prior version into your environment.

When the team is ready to deploy to test or production, you can use Pipelines in Power Platform for the release. Building and deploying using developer tools isn’t available yet for this new format.

We hope you enjoy the preview. There are many current limitations and you shouldn’t use this feature in environments or Git folders where you’re developing production solutions. Please leave your feedback below, in the community forums, on social media, or another outlet of choice. We look forward to hearing what you’d like to see prioritized next.

Learn more

Overview of Power Platform Git integration

Setup Git integration

The post Introducing Git Integration in Power Platform (preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

It only takes a few minutes to configure pipelines and share with makers. Pipelines are then run directly within development environments or PAC CLI. An intuitive in-product experience guides the deployment process and educates citizen developers about healthy ALM practices. This is easy to understand with automatic safeguards applied and complexities abstracted by the system. For example, connections, environment variables, and deployment pre-validations are built into the experience, ensuring citizen devs and the applications deployed are more successful.

You might have noticed we’re announcing GA sooner than initially anticipated. Why is that?

Customer adoption and feedback during preview have been overwhelmingly positive with many customers expressing desire to use pipelines in production (which is typically inadvisable for preview features). We’ve shipped many updates during the preview to improve overall quality, reliability, and ensure backward compatibility for upcoming releases. Numerous signals we monitor provide high confidence in Microsoft’s ability to support your production workloads at any scale.

Rest assured; there’s no shortage of new pipelines features and experience improvements in the works. Our roadmap remains intact, and we’re committed to supporting larger scale projects that often necessitate more advanced ALM functionality. I’d like to share what the team is currently developing and will be made available shortly. This is not an exhaustive list of what’s coming. The below GIFs were recorded from actual working demos and edited for length.

Schedule deployments (coming soon)

Often, customers wish to deploy updates during non-business hours. It minimizes risks of impacting end users during their workday and resulting business impact. Automation ensures you can ship smaller, more frequent, updates on a scheduled basis. It also avoids the team working weekends to attend deployments. In fact, at Microsoft we use similar techniques to release Power Platform updates and soon customers can achieve the same.

But that’s not the only reason we needed scheduling functionality. The ability to capture a deployment request without immediately deploying is a prerequisite for much more.

Pipelines extensibility (coming soon)

Soon you’ll be able to run custom logic both before and after a deployment executes. Using Power Automate cloud flows, the possibilities are rather endless. There are over 900 built-in connectors as well as the ability to develop custom connectors.

Configuring a pre-step condition on a deployment stage ensures the deployment request to the target environment is pending until the deployment is approved. The system then carries out the automated deployment. Similarly, you could incorporate automation running within other systems. For example, committing solutions to a source code repository or running automated tests. With Power Platform handling the heavy lifting, these hybrid approaches enable advanced functionality at a fraction of the setup and maintenance costs when compared to running DevOps tools standalone. Perhaps most importantly, the maker friendly in-product experience doesn’t expose background complexities.

Configuring a post-step condition on a deployment stage can also be leveraged for running advanced post-deployment logic, or simple automations such as notifying a maker when their deployment succeeds.

Delegated deployments (coming soon)

What about preventing makers from customizing directly in production? Today, some customers use service principals within Azure DevOps and GitHub to deploy solutions. This way, only the service principal is required to have customization permissions in prod (required to import solutions). Not makers. However, it can become quite cumbersome to setup and manage. Soon, these use cases will be supported within pipelines in Power Platform. Note this will become available after scheduling and extensibility.

Managed environments

Pipelines requires access to one or more Managed Environments. While the date for pipelines GA has changed, the timeline for enforcing use of Managed Environments in pipelines hasn’t. We intend to add these enforcements in the second half of 2023 to help admins stay compliant. Developer environments can now be enabled as Managed Environments and used in pipelines for development and QA through the Power Apps Developer Plan license. It’s a good time to start planning your environment strategy if you haven’t done so already.

Learn more about pipelines

• Pipelines overview Microsoft docs
• Set up pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Run a pipeline. Microsoft docs

Videos:

• New! How to do ALM with Power Platform. Video comparing what’s available in Azure DevOps, GitHub, and pipelines in Power Platform with Casey Burke and Kartik Kanakasabesan
• Microsoft Mechanics. Video on Managed environments and pipelines with host Jeremy Chapman and Power Apps GPM Evan Lew
• Power CAT Live. Video on pipelines with host Phil Topness, and PM’s Casey Burke and Kartik Kanakasabesan

We’re grateful for the overwhelming support and customer feedback received during the preview. Please do keep it coming! You can comment below and in the Power Apps community.

The post Pipelines in Power Platform is Generally Available (GA) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

When makers export and import solutions from development environments to production environments manually, IT loses visibility and control over apps. Some customers use pro-dev and IT-centric tools, like Microsoft Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions to implement an automated ALM process in their organization. While powerful, these tools are not citizen-developer friendly and often rely on a DevOps team to drive implementation and oversee the process. Pipelines aims to bridge this gap in a manner that’s much simpler, faster, and cost-effective to setup and maintain.

Pipelines can be setup and run entirely within Power Platform – with governance, visibility, and safeguards automatically built in so that your business solutions can come to market faster with less effort and higher quality. The system handles all the heavy lifting and ongoing maintenance so you don’t have to.

1. Admins easily configure automated deployment pipelines in minutes rather than days or weeks. Then manage access and view all deployment activity across your organization within the same location. Start simple (yet healthy) with the option to later extend pipelines as your business needs and product capabilities evolve.
2. Makers have an intuitive user experience for deploying their solutions in just a few clicks – directly within the environment they’re already working in. Before initiating the deployment, connections are automatically setup or mapped in the target environment and new environment variable values can be provided. This ensures everything is properly connected when deployed.
3. Professional developers can (optionally) retrieve pipeline information as well as run pipelines using their preferred tools such as the Power Platform command line interface (CLI). Underlying tasks required previously to accomplish the same outcome are now handled by pipelines. Developers just need to tell the system what they want to accomplish instead of needing to manage how it’s accomplished.

Getting started

It’s never been easier to setup automated deployment pipelines across your Power Platform environments. Simply create the environments you’ll use for ALM, install the Power Platform pipelines application in one environment (which will host all pipeline configuration and run data spanning multiple other environments your pipelines interact with). Next, create one or more pipelines and link the development and target environments. That’s it! Now you can run them directly within any development environment(s) associated with the pipeline.

You can then see reports for all deployment activity across your organization, access error and audit logs, retrieve backups of all solution files, and much more.

Note that pipelines is in preview and may not be available in your region yet. Pipelines is a feature of Managed Environments and you will need access to one or more Managed Environments to use these capabilities (although this requirement won’t be enforced until Pipelines is generally available).

Feedback and what’s next?

This is the beginning of a new journey for Power Platform ALM. We don’t expect it to address every use case for every customer immediately. We’ll add improvements with each iteration and your feedback is incredibly valuable in helping prioritize what’s most critical to tackle next! Please leave your feedback below and in the Power Apps community.

We’re really excited about many other capabilities already in the works. Soon you’ll be able to better custom tailor pipelines to the needs of your organization with more streamlined interfaces, deployments with approvals, ability to add your own custom logic and extensions, and ensuring pipelines within Power Platform is a welcomed addition to ALM processes being orchestrated using other software systems and tools. Note that pipelines do not intend to compete with powerful DevOps systems such as Azure DevOps and GitHub. Rather, pipelines intends to serve as the baseline for Power Platform ALM – with Power Platform handling its’ own sophistication internally so that you don’t need to externally. And with DevOps and COE tools being the mechanics to extend in-product ALM capabilities to accommodate your more advanced workloads.

Thank you for reading. On a personal note, I want to thank the many teams and leaders that came together to deliver these capabilities. What may appear simple on the outside, has a great deal of sophistication on the inside. I’m grateful having the opportunity to work with such a talented team and passionate group of customers and partners. We’re not done and look forward to your feedback as well as what comes next. From us to you, have a wonderful holiday season!

Learn more about pipelines

• Microsoft Mechanics. Video on Managed environments and pipelines with host Jeremy Chapman and Power Apps GPM Evan Lew
• Power CAT Live. Video on pipelines with host Phil Topness, and PM’s Casey Burke and Kartik Kanakasabesan
• Pipelines overview Microsoft docs
• Set up pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Run a pipeline. Microsoft docs

The post Automate deployments with pipelines in Power Platform, now in preview appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.