Continuous integration and continuous deployment, also known as CI/CD, is the process of delivering value to users in a fast and high-quality process.
With Microsoft Fabric, it’s even more important to have a robust CI/CD process. With a good process in place, your data and analytics teams can deliver value at scale, while making sure their changes and updates are production-ready.
We are excited to share new capabilities of Fabric CI/CD, that are now available for everyone.
New items supported in CI/CD
We are happy to announce that new items now support CI/CD capabilities:
- Data pipelines - available in git integration and deployment pipelines.
- Warehouse - available in git integration and deployment pipelines.
- Spark Environment - available in git integration and deployment pipelines.
- Spark Job Definition - available in git integration.
With the full list of items that are now available for git integration and deployment pipelines, we are getting closer to a wide coverage of Fabric items that can be managed in CI/CD. We are committed to continue and add all items, so you can build a unified process for all your Fabric items.
E2E automated CI/CD process
Few months ago, we announced the release of Fabric git APIs.
Today, we are announcing the release of Fabric deployment pipelines APIs. We are starting with ‘Deploy’ API, which will allow you to deploy the entire workspace, or only selected items. Later, we will add additional APIs that will allow developers to fully manage deployment pipelines by creating a pipeline, assigning a workspace and managing user access.
With the availability of Fabric deployment pipelines APIs, developers can now manage their build and release process end-to-end using familiar tools, such as Azure DevOps. Based on this tutorial, here’s an example of how you can automate the process with the available APIs:
- Create a build pipeline that is being triggered by any new commit merged to ‘main’ branch. As part of this pipeline, you can use ‘Update from Git’ API to automatically upload the latest commit to the workspace in ‘Development’ stage of your deployment pipeline.
- Create a release pipeline that is triggered after the build pipeline is completed successfully, and the new commit was uploaded to the ‘development’ workspace. The release pipeline will use the ‘Deploy’ API to selectively deploy the relevant items changed in the last commit between the stages of your pipeline. You can add approvals and gates to verify that the content is ready to be deployed to the next stage.
This is just one suggestion out of the many new options for automated processes that the Fabric APIs enables.
Deployment pipelines in the Navigation Pane
Today, you have two options to access Deployment pipelines:
1. On any of fabric experiences, you can find Deployment pipeline entry point at the bottom of your workspaces list:
2. In Power BI experience, you can find Deployment pipeline entry point
on the left navigation bar:
However, starting May 2024, the latter will become an optional feature in all fabric experiences, so it could be found in the '...' menu, ready to be pinned to the navigation bar if you choose so.
This change will be first applied to Power BI experience only so it will no longer be displayed there by default but will be available to be pinned to the navigation bar by demand.
By early June, pinning deployment pipelines will be available on other fabric experiences as well:
Changes to deployment operation in Deployment pipelines
Removing 'Owner' restriction when deploying Fabric items
We have implemented an update that relaxes the restriction within Deployment pipelines, which previously required that a deployer must also be the owner of the item in the target stage. With that update, anyone having either workspace Member or Admin permissions, on each of the deployment involved stages, will be able to deploy*.
*The update is specific to fabric items. There is no update to how Power BI items behave in deployment. They will maintain their existing functionality as before.
Workspace contributors can deploy items in deployment pipelines (coming soon)
We are expanding the existing permissions to include workspace contributors, enabling them to deploy as well. This means that permissions for deployment will be updated to Contributor+ level, as opposed to the current requirement of Member+. The update will be implemented by end of July 2024.
Call to action - please revisit the permissions of workspaces assigned to a deployment pipeline, to verify the expected change will not impact the release process in unwanted ways.