Get Started with ALM in Power Platform
Automatic Solution Deployment
For those you working on Power Platform, if you have not, it is time to get started with ALM in Power Platform.
No need to connect to multiple environments, export solutions, download solution files, manually create connections and populate deployment settings files, import solutions, or handle various other tasks that were required previously.
Application lifecycle management (ALM) generally is a set of processes and tools that help organizations manage the governance, development and maintenance of software applications.
We can bring this concept into Power Platform projects and enjoy the following benefits:
- Quality and consistency of your applications across different environments, such as development, testing, staging, and production.
- Collaborate with other developers and app makers on the same project, and track the changes and versions of your solutions.
- Automate the deployment of your solutions using tools such as Power Platform Build Tools for Azure DevOps and GitHub Actions for Power Platform.
What are the options and the resources to get started:
Power Platform Pipeline (In built):
This is the native one in built into the power platform and can be found in the Makers portal (make.powerapps.com) when you navigate to any solution:
The main thing to know about this option is that your environments must be Managed environments except the host environment which is responsible for orchestrating the process. The host environment holds information about storage and management layer for config, security & run history. It is recommended to be a prod type.
Learn more: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/pipelines
Azure DevOps (using Power Platform Build Tools): This one involves using Microsoft Power Platform Build Tools tasks with any other available Azure DevOps tasks to compose your build and release pipelines. The pipeline unpacks exports the unmanaged solution, unpacks it and import as managed into the destination environment as shown below:
Learn more: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/devops-build-tools.
I will be doing a walkthrough of these options in my next posts, stay tuned!!
Which of these options have you tried?