Versioning and DevOps integration go hand-in-hand to our opinion.
Looking at the Power BI release plan, dataflow support for Deployment Pipelines is coming up shortly! Currently it is scheduled for June 2021 to reach the public preview state. The current gaps we identify in the native Power BI Deployment Pipelines are the lack of dataflow support, versioning capabilities and DevOps integration.
In this blog we will run you through the configuration of the DevOps extension, where you can download it and get you up to speed! Get you up to speed with the ALM topic My colleague Ton and I had the privilege to get our hands on this in an early stage, which gave us the opportunity to build an Azure DevOps extension (read along!) based on these all-new APIs. Though, versioning was a missing functionality at the time.Īs you might have seen, during the recent MS Build conference, Microsoft announced API support for Power BI Deployment Pipelines. In this blog I highlighted some strengths of Power BI Deployment pipelines, like incremental and metadata deployment.
BI creators can incrementally transition new or updated content between environments, reconfiguring them with the appropriate data connections and permissions.Īs I wrote in July 2020 in my blog about why you should care about Power BI deployment pipelines, there were some functionalities lacking in Power BI deployment pipelines, which are easy to build and configure yourself in Azure DevOps as you have full flexibility to customize operations to match your organizational processes. As Microsoft stated: Deployment pipelines help enterprise BI teams build an efficient and reusable process by maintaining development, test, and production environments. In May 2020, Microsoft announced Power BI deployment pipelines, a native ALM feature as part of the Power BI Service. Till today, this blog post is still my most read blog on which makes us proud. Back then, there were not many options available for versioning and professionalizing your ALM story for Power BI. Back in 2019, Ton Swart and I wrote a blog post on Versioning and CI/CD for Power BI with Azure DevOps.