Last month, Power BI announced the public preview of Premium per user (PPU). This new user license enables any Power BI user access to all Premium features previously available only by purchasing a Premium capacity.
This is exciting news for all BI creators that build content in Power BI, as they can now leverage deployment pipelines to manage their content, and deliver higher quality updates faster, to their end users.
What’s in it for me?
If your organization never used Premium capacity, you can now try PPU licenses for all users and enjoy the same features as a Premium capacity has to offer. If your organization is small to medium, using the new license will probably be more affordable than buying a P1 capacity. With the new license, you can very easily start working with deployment pipelines to better manage your content.
If you are a part of an organization that already has a Premium capacity that was used only for Production content, you can now buy PPU licenses only for your BI team and use the licenses for the ‘Development’ and ‘Test’ stages, without the need to buy additional capacity for it. Here’s an example of how the workspaces can be set up in such a pipeline(for details, open image in a new tab):
You can see that the ‘Development’ and ‘Test’ stages are assigned to a PPU capacity, while the Production stage is assigned to a regular Premium capacity.
Read more about it in this great blog post by Marc Lelijveld.
How can I use the new license to work with deployment pipelines?
Once you have a PPU license, you can assign its workspace to the PPU reserved capacity. Then you can create a new pipeline and assign that workspace to the pipeline.
Note that when you deploy content across stages, new workspaces are created automatically for you. those workspaces would be assigned by default to the PPU reserved capacity as well. You can later change the capacity of those workspaces if you have access to other Premium capacities. Deployment pipelines works with any combination of Premium capacities between its stages.