Personal Power Platform Pipelines - Revisited

I've written previously my thoughts on Personal Power Platform Pipelines and ways to prevent the ability to use them in lieu of a tenant/environment setting. But since then, there have been some additional features and I sat down with the product group to discuss their usage beyond official blogs and documentation. Here are some of my updated thoughts on Personal Power Platform Pipelines.

Who are Personal Power Platform Pipelines designed for?

I asked this question myself in my previous post because I couldn't quite see the use case, but it's become a bit clearer now. It's for either those smaller implementation where maybe you just have a Dev and Prod and Dev serves as your testing and training environment, or for those organisations that don't have the ability and resources to create and manage full pipelines across the estate.

This is why:

• The UI showed 1 target environment which has now been increase to 2

• The Default Platform Environment (where personal pipelines are created) consumes no storage to either provision or during it's lifetime

Most smaller organisations may only have enough storage for 2 environments, I know I've worked with my fair share of orgs that only had 2 and now with them increasing target environments to 2, this does enable that Dev, Test, Prod that Microsoft themselves recommend as best practice. That's a good update.

Also, while querying why only 2 target environments are available, as it seems artificially limited in the UI, this is intentional. Again thinking from the perspective of Makers/Citizen Developers/Solo System admins, having more options is usually not needed, so the personal pipelines will do fine. This is also part of the reason why they cannot be extended (as you can't build flows in the Default Platform Environment) and why by default, the Environment is mostly hidden.

But if you wanted you, you can go into the Personal Pipeline Host and add additional environments to the Pipeline. However, you still can't extend them through Power Automate.

Why are Personal Power Platform Pipelines available to everyone?

Again, when I was thinking about this, I was looking at the enterprise lens of environment management, but I needed to take a step back and discuss benefits to other customers. Those smaller organisations where there are only a few builders or supported by partners, where companies can't afford to pay for storage fees for an additional environment to store solution files, where Microsoft really want to scale back the barrier for entry to Pipelines (as they have so many advantages) and allowing everyone to use them.

Yes, this presents an issue for those large to enterprise organisations who suddenly had hundreds of users creating Pipelines, especially with some of the limitations like Pipelines which cannot be shared with other users, essentially blocker or duplicating Pipelines, but it does help those smaller organisations. I expressed my desire to have more administrative controls for personal Pipelines and recently we had a new update to bring an amazing feature, Default Pipeline Host.

This new features allows admins to direct people away from Personal Pipelines to a full custom Pipeline host. This is a welcome addition for admins and governance. While Personal Pipelines are there to kickstart the ALM for organisations with all the amazing features of Pipelines, being able to push people to full Pipelines with a setting is a fantastic. You can check out the details of this feature here.

Microsoft want adoption of Pipelines because of the great advantages Pipelines have and the best way to do that is to give access to it to everyone. This worried me from an enterprise perspective but Microsoft seem to be moving in the right direction with the additional tooling. It's like Power Apps, where you can create as many Power Apps as you like, but only running them is when you need a license. I like that Microsoft never charge you to build, only to use. It's a good model.

Recommendations

I think when you look at Pipelines in a wide ALM and customer perspective, there are multiple things you need to consider. Below is a table with some of my ideas as to where ALM fits in, in general for organisations.

Scale of Org	Size of Org	Makers	ALM	Notes
Small	1-250	No	Personal Pipelines	Maybe Sys admins or Partner supported
Medium	250-1000	No	Personal Pipelines	Maybe Sys admins or Partner supported
Medium	250-1000	Yes	Custom Pipelines	With Maker strategy
Large	1000-10,000	No	Custom Pipelines	With Pro Dev teams
Large	1000-10,000	Yes	Custom Pipelines	With Maker or Pro Dev Strategy
Enterprise	10,000+	No	Custom Pipelines
Enterprise	10,000+	Yes	Custom Pipelines	With Maker or Pro Dev Strategy

The above are just some of my thoughts on Personal Pipelines vs Custom Host Pipelines given my discussions and new features announced, and is in no way endorsed by Microsoft or the product group, but I'm interested in how other people are using them or strategizing ALM. This also does not consider other ALM methods like ADO or GitHub, but just Power Platform Pipelines. You should always review the best options for your organisation and the tools you have access to.

I still think Pipelines are one of the best features on the platform for a long time and I use them extensively!

Ciao for now! MCJ