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.

What’s new?

With the latest updates, makers and admins have more control over the structure and usage of personal pipelines, allowing them to customize them to their needs.

Add a stage to your single-stage pipeline

Pipeline owners can append an additional stage to their personal pipelines, enabling them to create a lightweight dev->test->prod 2-stage pipeline if applicable.

Reuse your pipeline in a different development environment

Lightweight pipeline creators can use a pipeline they’ve already made, even if the current environment isn’t linked to the pipeline yet. Then, when the maker deploys, the environment will be linked as a source.

Admins can use Force Link to move environments from one pipelines host to another and instantly resolve cross-host environment association errors

As part of the “environment is already associated with another host” error, there is now a Force Link action available for admins to delink an environment from a current pipelines host and link it to the one they want to govern ALM in.

In addition to these new capabilities, we have also enabled redeploying previous solution versions by default for newly created pipelines. This setting can still be managed by admins in the Deployment Pipeline Configuration app via Manage pipelines.

Easy ALM for Makers

Pipelines for All is a jumpstart to healthy ALM with no extra privileges required, no conflicts with existing environments associated with pre-configured custom pipelines hosts, and, most importantly, no hassle to deploy your solutions.

When deploying, target environments must be enabled as Managed Environments.

Admins still have control

Personal pipelines rely on makers’ import-access to target environments. Admins can directly control what environments makers have import-access to by either creating custom security roles or customizing current privileges. We are also working on other governance features that will scale the management of personal pipelines as well as bulk environment association to a custom host. In custom hosts, unlike within the platform host, pipeline creation can be further restricted and pipelines can be as advanced as you are willing to make them using our various extensibility points.

ALM isn’t a one-size-fits-all space, and we have designed Pipelines with that core principle at the forefront. Pipelines is a solution that has the power to work for everyone, and we are just as excited as you are with each new update we make.

Learn more about pipelines

• Set up pipelines in Power Platform. Microsoft docs

The post Pipelines for All are now Generally Available (GA) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

With these updates, we’re excited to announce the general availability of delegated deployments for pipelines in Power Platform!

Additionally, admins can now enable pipelines for multi-geo support, making it easy to centrally administer global deployments within a single management plane.

Build

As makers develop, customizations are automatically saved to their preferred solution (no need to understand or navigate to solutions). This avoids downstream deployment issues, painful debugging steps, and other common mishaps.

 When authoring solution cloud flows, drafts and versioning provides a history for each published version of the flow. Makers can view the version history, restore prior versions, and save draft changes without publishing them live – even if the flow has errors! Then, the flow can be published when they are ready to run the flow. Please leave your drafts and versioning comments and feedback here.

Test

Admins can improve quality by ensuring solution checker runs on every deployment, and configure issue tolerance levels for different environments. Pipelines can be extended to run additional code and security scanning tools, or automated tests by integrating your source control systems. Functional user acceptance testing is also recommended after deployment to test environments.

We recommend starting with pipelines in Power Platform and using extensions if you need to integrate more advanced workloads running in Azure DevOps, GitHub, etc. Similarly, if taking dependencies on test automation, we recommend Test Engine.

Release

Makers are guided to deploy at the right time. For example, when manually exporting and importing solutions or blocked by sharing limits.

Instead, sharing is requested during deployment to target environments, like production, where it’s appropriate to share broadly. Admins simply need to approve the combined deployment and sharing request, and the rest happens automatically. Sharing is rolling out for canvas apps and soon for cloud flows and security roles.

Makers can also update existing environment variables and connection references in pipelines and solution import. Combined, these capabilities protect production assets with least privileged access, reduce admin burden, and train makers to submit all updates via your organization’s change management process. If admins haven’t configured pipelines and governance policies, makers are empowered to create their own pipeline to environments (they must already have access to manually import solutions. Pipelines doesn’t escalate permissions). Admins can apply additional governance controls and manage security within the default host and custom hosts. There’s a new entry point within the solution experience to Manage pipelines and a Security Teams section in the app to manage pipelines access. Note: we currently recommend using a custom pipelines host when more advanced control is desired.

 

Why pipelines vs manual export/import? Unlike manual export/import, pipelines stores backups for every version of every solution deployed, and admin accessible audit logs describing who, what, when, where, and why (AI provided). Pipelines deployments enjoy higher success rates by pre-validating solutions against target environments and sequencing multiple deployments to avoid conflicts. 

 

Solution simplification remains an ongoing effort. Recent improvements include streamlined dependency management and automatic conversion of unmanaged to managed solution objects (see moving from unmanaged to managed solutions).

 

What if breaking changes are inadvertently deployed? Now makers and admins can now re-deploy prior solution versions using pipelines or developer tooling.

 

Documentation

• ALM Guide
• Pipelines in Power Platform
• Managed environments
• Power Platform Developer tools
   

The post April 2024 ALM blog: What’s new and what it means for you appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Makers can now initiate a redeployment from a successful deployment record via the Run history tab on the Pipelines page. Pipeline owners will have the authority to control this feature’s enablement as well, so no worries about someone rolling back without permission. In pipeline settings, there is a new configuration option, Allow redeployment of older versions, which can be controlled by the pipeline owner(s). In addition to the setting, there is a confirmation message before deployment configuration and a warning message at the end of the configuration on the summary page specifying that the action is irreversible, so that there is guaranteed intent to overwrite the current solution version with the older one.

We hope that this simple, yet monumental feature will better assist customers in enabling best ALM practices seamlessly for their organizations, and remove the hassle of restoring previous versions of solutions in target environments.

Learn more about pipelines

Redeploy past solution versions. Microsoft docs

Overview of pipelines in Power Platform. Microsoft docs

The post Redeploy past solution versions using pipelines appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This feature is now available in make.preview.powerapps.com for you to try out, and will be available for everyone in make.powerapps.com by the end of the week.

How does this work?

Thanks to a newly integrated pipelines host available to be provisioned in the platform itself, Pipelines can be set up as soon as you get to the Pipelines page. From the new experience, makers can now create pipelines in environments that are not already associated with a custom host (i.e. environments that are not already using pipelines). The Create pipeline experience enables makers to name their personal pipeline and select a target environment, enabled as a Managed Environment, that they have import access to. From clicking Save, the lightweight pipeline is created, and they are ready to leverage the benefits of pipelines like no .zip file downloads or uploads required, deployment scheduling, inline target environment solution validation, upfront environment variable value validation, recorded deployment stage run history, and Copilot-generated deployment notes.

Who benefits? And what about admins?

Makers who are currently manually exporting their solutions from their development environments and importing to a test or production environment can now instantly benefit from pipelines if they have Managed Environments enabled for their target environment(s). And, when an admin is ready to set up pipelines the traditional way and enable extensibility such as approvals, they still can. The process of going from efficient personal pipelines to a central governed pipeline will also be made easy by the end of next month when this feature becomes Generally Available.

We hope this will make it much easier to get started with Pipelines and enable all makers to adopt healthy ALM practices.

Learn more about Pipelines for All

• Set up pipelines in Power Platform. Microsoft docs

The post Pipelines for All Public Preview: Easily set up pipelines in Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In the two months of Public Preview, we saw an amazing response from the hundreds of customers who were using Copilot to make their deployment experiences even more seamless.

One customer told us, “This is a valuable feature for us. Before, we couldn’t see what the solution contained. Giving this ability to the makers and support team, they are now able to see what this solution contains when the deployments occur. How many tables, environment variables, Canvas apps, etc.— they don’t have to go and hunt down this information because AI provides it for them.”

To make this new capability even easier to use, we made it faster, reducing p95 wait time by 10+ seconds. This also enabled us to create a better experience, where we briefly show a sleek new generating animation and automatically fill the deployment notes field with the solution overview. Innovation does not stop there, though. We are continuing to make improvements to the model, which will make Copilot in pipelines even smarter and more accurate in the near future.

We hope that you will continue to leverage Copilot’s power to help everyone in your organization make ALM faster and more accessible!

Learn more about pipelines

• Pipelines overview Microsoft docs
• Set up pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Run a pipeline. Microsoft docs
• Extend pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Use Copilot to generate deployment notes in pipelines. Microsoft docs

The post Copilot-generated deployment notes for pipelines are Generally Available (GA) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

​Delegated deployments run pipelines as service principals, or as the pipeline owner (including service accounts).​ This ensures developers of any skill level can request deployments without needing elevated (or any) permissions in target environments. For security reasons, approvals are required – whether automated or manual. This is simple and highly capable with Power Automate Approvals and Copilot powered deployment notes providing pertinent information about the deployment request.​

Delegated deployments has been the top requested pipelines feature since we launched pipelines preview last December. But it’s not about blocking developers, or inhibiting the ROI realized from enabling citizen development with the Power Platform. Rather, it’s about empowering citizen development at scale without sacrificing security or auditability.

We’ve also introduced another pipelines extension with this update. Now you can run custom validation logic before solutions are exported from development environments. Combined, pipelines now offers three gated extensions, opening the in-product deployment capabilities to a wide range of use cases. Similarly, pipelines can be customized with low-code, no-code, and/or pro-code.

We’d love your feedback and look forward to more customers empowering citizen developers while also protecting their production assets.

Learn more

​

The post Announcing pipelines delegated deployments (SPN) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Solutions can get very complicated very quickly, many times containing dozens of components that would be tedious to summarize and list out. As a maker deploying a solution through a pipeline, that summarization could be critical in providing your admin the context necessary to approve your deployment. Instead of spending minutes describing your solution, why not get Copilot to do it for you instantly?

Using the summarization powers of AI, Copilot will now provide makers a solution overview that includes a brief solution description as well as an overview of the components it contains. The more descriptive you make your solution components’ (e.g., Canvas Apps’) name and description, the more information this solution overview can provide.

This Public Preview feature is currently limited to U.S. environments and pipelines, but we are planning to expand the capabilities of Copilot across geographic regions with support for different languages. Eventually, we will be updating this feature to include a summary of version differences between deployments, keeping this solution overview structure for first deployments in a pipeline. This is also foundational for the future of solution descriptions in Managed Environments, making it easier than ever to manage solutions, so be sure to keep an eye out for that in the coming months!

Copilot is empowering Power Platform makers and admins to be exponentially more efficient, and simultaneously making ALM easier than ever before. Try it today when deploying using pipelines.

Learn more about pipelines

• Pipelines overview Microsoft docs
• Set up pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Run a pipeline. Microsoft docs
• Extend pipelines. Microsoft docs
• Use Copilot to generate deployment notes in pipelines (preview). Microsoft docs

The post Copilot now powers deployment notes for pipelines in Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

It has been amazing to see how pipelines in Power Platform have been used over the past few months since the general availability (GA) release in March, saving companies like Lumen time and with ALM becoming approachable to more citizen developers. Today, we’re excited to announce many new features available in Pipelines! In this blog post, I’ll be going through the latest updates to the pipelines experience and guiding you through the steps to making your deployments more powerful than before.

The biggest theme of this update is making pipelines better serve their intended purpose: executing deployments when and how you want. To avoid unexpected disruption of production-level applications and services, we have integrated these new features into pipelines while staying true to our ease-of-use mission.

Scheduled Deployments

Now when you go to deploy, there will be an option to schedule the deployment for a later time. To avoid deploying changes during your organization’s business hours, for example, you can schedule it for any time you want after hours or on weekends. Now makers don’t have to wait until after hours to deploy after hours!

Need to make a change and cancel the deployment? No problem! In the maker portal and within the Pipelines configuration app, admins and makers can cancel scheduled deployments as well as those pending approval.

In a later update, scheduling will be able to be admin-controlled, meaning that makers will only be able to schedule deployments for admin-preset timeframes (or not; however your organization would prefer it).

Extensibility

Deployment process customization has finally arrived. Pipelines extensibility provides admins more control with the ability to configure deployment gates and apply custom logic at multiple steps of your deployment process. With Power Automate cloud flows, choose from over 1,000 built-in connectors or use your own custom connectors to run your own custom logic.

Configuring a pre-step condition on a deployment stage ensures the deployment request to the target environment is pending until the deployment is approved or rejected. Respectively, the system then carries out the automated deployment or notifies the maker of what changes are needed for approval.

Note that deployments will run in the requesting maker’s context. Soon, deploying via service principal will be supported.

Another common use case is integrating other systems. For example, committing solutions to a source code repository or running automated tests and code scans. 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 CI/CD tools standalone. Perhaps most importantly, the maker friendly in-product experience doesn’t expose background complexities.

Release Notes

Now makers can add notes to their deployments. Adding context to deployments can assist admin in understanding what is being deployed and the purpose of the deployment. This can be leveraged with extensibility to give admins who are approving deployments more context for the deployment and solution contents.

These deployment notes will also be available in the run history and pipelines configuration app for future reference, so management of deployments becomes easier as well.

Coming soon, everyone will be able to use the AI-suggested deployment notes to automatically generate deployment notes, from solution descriptions to version diffs.

Support for Power Pages

Building on the excitement from Power Pages configuration being supported in solutions, pipelines is now available within the solution experience in the Power Pages portal.

Sovereign cloud support

By mid-June, pipelines will be available in all sovereign clouds (in addition to all public cloud regions).

Learn more about pipelines

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

Videos:

• Pipelines for Power Platform 101. Video on the purpose of pipelines and everything you need to use them successfully with Prabhat Pandey
• 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 hope that you continue to use pipelines to make ALM easy for everyone, and look forward to even more updates in the coming months!

The post More power with pipelines in Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.