More power with pipelines in Power Platform

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!