[ALM Accelerator - QUESTION] Future of ALM Accelerator / GitHub Support

[LukasSchauffele]

What is your question?

Hi Team!

First off, thanks for all the work you've put into the ALM Accelerator. Without it, our organisation wouldn't be able to use Power Platform in the capacity we do.

My question is around the long-term strategy for the ALM Accelerator. Does Microsoft plan to support this project going forward? Are big features such as GiHub support #47 still on the roadmap? Is the plan to eventually deprecate the Accelerator in favour of Pipelines/Managed Solutions?

Thank you Lukas

What component are you experiencing the issue with?

ALM Accelerator Pipelines

What solution version are you using?

September 2023

AB#327

[sdhsynsci]

Same Question?

[mikefactorial]

@LukasSchauffele and @sdhsynsci thanks for the question. We've addressed this several times in our monthly office hours, but good to have it here for SEO. Our direction forward with the ALM Accelerator is going to focus on extending Pipelines for Power Platform as the in-product pipelines are receiving the most investment from the product team and will be the future of ALM for Power Platform. We recognize that there are gaps today between the capabilities in the ALM Accelerator and the in product pipelines and we are looking to, and working closely with the pipelines team to address those gaps and at the same time provide a smooth transition for ALM Accelerator users to move to in-product pipelines.

You may or may not be aware that the ALM Accelerator is what's used internally by the Power CAT team to do ALM for all of the kits that we build (e.g. CoE Starter Kit, Automation Kit, Creator Kit and the ALM Accelerator itself). As of writing this we are still using the ALM Accelerator for ALM. However, we have aspirations to move to using the in-product pipelines for our own ALM which will require additional work from our team to fill the gaps we have. The product of us moving to pipelines in-product will be guidance for others to make the transition and new functionality that fills the parity gaps with today's ALM Accelerator.

The gaps in questions are primarily

1. Source Control as the source of truth
2. Code First support for plugins, PCF etc.
3. Additional Post Deployment Configuration support (sharing, ownership, data ingestion etc.)

On the topic of GitHub workflow / action support, while this has been something we've wanted to do for a long time we just haven't had the resources to tackle it. We've had enough of a backlog supporting Azure DevOps for the last several years that our small team hasn't had the capacity to maintain, test and support both. Additionally, we've had some technical blockers in the past including supporting both with a single Canvas App. As of writing this GitHub support is still not a priority and likely won't come to the ALM Accelerator before the platform introduces native source control and then we would only provide extensions to fill other gaps that remain.

All that being said, we are still supporting, maintaining and iterating on our existing Azure DevOps pipelines and as new requirements come to the in-product pipeline extensions they will also come to the ALM Accelerator by virtue of both using the same code base (i.e. the extensions we've built are using the same pipeline YAML as the ALM Accelerator and we are only adding to the existing pipeline YAML). However, investments in the front-end (Canvas App) are going to be less and less as the CAT Team migrates to using the in-product experience and as the in-product experience matures.

Finally, ALM Accelerator and all of the Kits built by the CAT team have been and always will be made available to improve adoption and to fill gaps in the platform based on customer needs as well as incubate experiences that could be achieved in the platform. As such, the hope is that one day none of our existing kits will be necessary as the product supports the use cases we do today and at that time the kits will become deprecated (what this means is still under discussion), but it may simply mean that no more investment will be made by the CAT team and the kit is turned over to the community to support and maintain. It's not likely that the kits will go away entirely any time in the foreseeable future.

Would love feedback here from you all on everything above and thanks again for bringing up the topic 👍

[gerald560]

Sad to hear this but I get it ... Mike are you able to comment on when Pipelines can achieve parity with ALM Accelerator? Keep us posted in this thread.

[mikefactorial]

Closing this out for now but feel free to provide more feedback / questions / suggestions on this thread. Definitely want to make sure we are doing what's best for our users.

[CoEStarterKitBot]

@LukasSchauffele This has been fixed in the latest release. Please install the latest version of the toolkit following the instructions for installing updates. Note that if you do not remove the unmanaged layers as described there you will not receive updates from us.