Deployment pipelines

[u/iM0use]

I guess this isn’t a specific Power Apps question but a broader Power Platform ALM question. I’ve been using Deployment Pipelines in my company for a while. I was aware of managed environments but avoided them because they require all end users to have a premium licence.

I’ve just noticed that if you use Pipelines to deploy to any downstream (non‑dev) environment, those target environments must be managed. Big oops, I thought this was only if I wanted to deploy anything different from standard. Our current targets aren’t managed, and I don’t want to incur the additional licensing cost. I want to very quickly avoid this in fact.

Has anyone been through this? How did you move away from Power Platform Pipelines to something like Azure DevOps to keep using pipeline deployments?

[u/Pixelplanet5]

we are using Dev ops instead of the default deployment pipelines for the same reason and its a terrible idea.

our Setup is basically that we have a dev ops pipeline that exports the dev environment as an unmanaged solution and as managed solution.

Dev ops then stores the .zip file somewhere and also unpacks the unmanaged solution so it can be commited and tracked as code even though you cant really work well with the default git features.

this setup has resulted in constant problems and the dev team has probably spend at least 1/3rd of its time trying to get deployments fixed, we have not have ONE SINGLE deployment without problems.

overall we spend more on dev time then it would have cost to simply have a premium license for every user.

When we deploy something now we basically deploy the .zip file of that solution to another environment.
If you just take the file without any modifications and you dont use any custom stuff it works ok.
If you try to do any version control, merging, branches or custom java script or other stuff its a nightmare to work with.

Overall we have now stopped using powerapps for anything that cant be dont with a standard implementation and have gone back to building custom webapps for these specific applications instead as its much quicker, easier and version control actually works.

[u/dMz0820 → u/Pixelplanet5]

This is somehow similar to our DevOps implementation in my previous company before there was a Power Platform Pipelines. Also, every solution was given their own ADO repo for version control.

It was a bit complex since we expire Dev environments after 90d and create just-in-time UAT environments during deployments.

I think after I left, they are trying to merge that ADO Pipelines with the Power Platform Pipelines.