Streamlining Power Platform Deployments with Pipelines

Brian Knight from Pragmatic Works demonstrates how to simplify deployments on Microsoft's Power Platform by using pipelines. The tutorial aims to help developers and admins to manage assets more efficiently across various environments: Development, QA, and Production.

Key Steps in the Pipeline Deployment Process

Configuration of Environments:

• Brian initially sets up Development, Test, and Production environments.
• All participating environments must be managed environments, which require premium user licenses.

Tooling Activation:

• Brian opts to keep tooling in a separate environment called the CoE Toolkit.
• Tooling can be activated by installing the Power Platform pipelines app within this environment.

Tooling Configuration and User Sharing:

• An application is used to configure all of the environments.
• Access to the tooling is shared with users via the admin center, assigning them specific roles like 'pipeline user' or 'pipeline administrator'.

Operational Highlights

• Creating Pipeline Stages: Brian creates two stages: one for moving from Dev to QA and another for moving from QA to Prod.
• Environment IDs: Important for proper setup, these IDs must be accurately copied and pasted from the Admin Center.
• Deployment: After verifying that the setup is correct, Brian deploys a solution, which includes a test environment variable and a table.
• Role-Based Access: Access to different functionalities within the pipeline tool can be controlled through roles.

Additional Features

• Dashboard and Reports: The pipeline tool comes with a dashboard and reporting features, showcasing successful deployments and failures.
• Run History: Allows users to track deployments and the state of the pipeline over time.
• Solution Artifacts: Provides backup of the solution file for each run.

The tutorial concludes by showing how changes made in the development environment can be easily propagated to other environments using the pipeline, demonstrating its efficiency and reliability.