Power Platform ALM – Application Lifecycle Management

Power Platform ALM – Application Lifecycle Management

In this blog, we will look at various functions and technical steps required to push code across environments, CI/CD, deployment scenarios and pipeline managements.

Tools and solutions required:

Managed Power Platform
Environment(s)
DEV, TEST / UAT & PROD
Managed Solutions
GitHub Access
Azure DevOps Access
Azure Pipeline
Power Platform CLI tools

Governance includes requirements management, resource management, data security, user access, change tracking, review, audit, deployment control, and rollback.

Application development includes identifying current problems, and planning, design, building, and testing the application. This area includes traditional developer and app maker roles.

Maintenance includes deployment of the app and maintenance of optional and dependent technologies.

Power Platform – ALM:

Dataverse lets you securely store and manage data that’s used by business applications.
To use the features and tools available for ALM, all environments that participate in ALM must include a Dataverse database.

The following concepts are important for understanding ALM using the Microsoft Power Platform:

Solutions are the mechanism for implementing ALM which you use to distribute components across environments through export and import.
Dataverse stores all the artifacts, including solutions.
Components (inside solutions) such as apps, flows, tables, site maps etc. represents something that you can potentially customize.
Source control should be your source of truth for storing and collaborating on your components.

Power Platform Packages:

You can deploy (export/import) canvas apps and flows by using packages.
This feature allows you to export an app from one environment and import it to another.
Only the Owners of an app or flow can export a package.
To import an app or flow, the Environment Maker permission is required on the destination environment.

Unmanaged Solution:

Used in development environments while you make changes to your application.
No restrictions on what can be added, removed, or modified.
Can be exported as unmanaged or managed
Should be checked into your source control system
You can’t delete its components by uninstalling the solution

Managed Solutions:

Complete solution that is intended to be distributed and installed
Components can’t be added or removed
Cannot be exported
Some changes can be done to components if explicitly allowed using managed properties
When a managed solution is deleted (uninstalled), all the customizations and extensions included with it are removed.

Solution Lifecycle:

Create
- Author and export unmanaged solutions
Update
- Create updates to a managed solution that are deployed to the parent managed solution
- You can’t delete components with an update
Upgrade
- Upgrade an existing managed solution
- Involve rolling up (merging) all patches to the solution into a new version of the solution
- Will delete components that existed but are no longer included in the upgraded version
- You can choose to upgrade immediately or to stage the upgrade so that you can do some additional actions prior to completing the upgrade
Patch
- Contains only the changes such as adding or editing components and assets.
- Use patches when making small updates (similar to a hotfix)
- You can’t delete components with a patch.

Publisher: