getting started with Power BI Deployment Pipelines

In this blog, I will explain how we can use the deployment pipelines for Power BI. Deployment pipelines become General Availability in Power BI.

Deployment pipelines helps enterprise BI teams build an efficient and reusable release process by maintaining development, test, and production environments.

BI teams adopting deployment pipelines, will enjoy:

1. Improved productivity

2. Faster content updates delivery

3. Reduced manual work and errors.

Pre-requisites

You will be able to access the deployment pipelines feature if the following conditions are met:

You have one of the following Premium licenses:

1. You are a Power BI Pro user, and you belong to an organization that has Premium capacity.

2. Premium Per User (PPU).

Create a deployment pipeline

You can create a pipeline from the deployment pipelines tab, or from a workspace.

After the pipeline is created, you can share it with other users or delete it. When you share a pipeline with others, the users you share the pipeline with will be given access to the pipeline. Pipeline access enables users to view, share, edit, and delete the pipeline.

Create a pipeline from the deployment pipelines tab

To create a pipeline from the deployment pipelines tab, do the following:

1. In Power BI service, from the navigation pane, select Deployment pipelines and then select Create pipeline.

2. In the Create a deployment pipeline dialog box, enter a name and description for the pipeline, and select Create.

Create a pipeline from a workspace

You can create a pipeline from an existing workspace, providing you’re the admin of a new workspace experience.

1. From the workspace, select Create a pipeline.

1. In the Create a deployment pipeline dialog box, enter a name and description for the pipeline, and select Create.

Assign a workspace to a deployment pipeline

After creating a pipeline, you need to add the content you want to manage to the pipeline. Adding content to the pipeline is done by assigning a workspace to the pipeline stage. You can assign a workspace to any stage.

You can assign one workspace to a deployment pipeline. Deployment pipelines will create clones of the workspace content, to be used in different stages of the pipeline.

Follow these steps to assign a workspace in a deployment pipeline:

1. In the newly created deployment pipeline, select Assign a workspace.

2. In the Choose the workspace drop-down menu, select the workspace you want to assign to the pipeline.

3. Select the stage you want to assign the workspace to.

Workspace assignment limitations

1. The workspace must be a new workspace experience.

2. You must be an admin of the workspace.

3. The workspace is not assigned to any other pipeline.

4. The workspace must reside on a Premium capacity.

5. You cannot assign a workspace with Power BI samples to a pipeline stage.

Deploying reports

Select the stage to deploy from and then select the deployment button. The deployment process creates a duplicate workspace in the target stage. This workspace includes all the content existing in the current stage.

In this below diagram we can see how we have deployed from Development to test and test to production environment.

In the upcoming blog, I will explain selective deployment, Backwards deployment, creating dataset rules and overriding content etc.

If you are interested in this topic and would like to do some further self-study, I encourage you to check out my blog on this.

#CICD #ContinuousDeployment #Deploymentpipelines #ContinuousIntegration #PowerBI