The deployment pipelines tool helps BI teams release content in a fast pace and with higher quality. For these reasons it is widely adopted by many customers, from small-medium businesses to large enterprises.
However, it is still a manual tool, that you can access and manage only through Power BI service. We know that many organizations are using different DevOps tools and already building their own CI/CD processes for various products. Power BI should have the option to integrate into those tools and processes.
We are happy to announce the first step in integrating Power BI lifecycle management with tools and processes you already use in your organization.
We are releasing a new set of REST APIs that allow developers to automate the deployment of content within an existing deployment pipeline. This includes all the types of deployment that exists today, including selective deployment and deploying all the content in a workspace. You will also have the option to update the app content right after the completion of a deployment. We also provided PowerShell samples for an easy integration with tools like Azure DevOps.
The new set of APIs opens plenty of new options for managing the deployment and the release of content in Power BI. Here are just few examples:
- Integrate Power BI into familiar DevOps tools such as Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions.
- Schedule pipeline deployments to happen automatically at a given time.
- Deploy multiple pipelines at same time.
- Cascade depending pipeline deployments – If you have content that’s connected across pipelines, you can make sure some pipelines are deployed before others.
What’s coming next?
This release is just the first step, as we will continue to expand the automation capabilities for deployment pipelines. In the coming semester , we will release:
- Create pipelines automatically– we will expand our APIs with the ability to create deployment pipelines from scratch, including assigning workspaces and sharing with other team members.
- Azure DevOps extension– We will expand our integration with Azure DevOps and Azure pipelines by building a native extension, for a fast and scalable integration of Power BI deployment pipelines into your existing Azure Pipelines.
You can read and get updates on the upcoming releases in the release notes.
Still missing important features? Please post ideas or vote for them so that we can know what is missing for your team.