Deployment Pipelines: 1 workspace per environment or 3?

Hi all. Sorry for the ask, but I’m between a rock and a hard place with a deployment and have an imminent deadline.

A Power BI infrastructure was designed and setup by another (now replaced by me) consultant and consists of separate DEV, TEST, and PROD environments, each consisting of:

  • 1 SharePoint folder containing multiple Excel files as data sources
  • 3 Power BI Workspaces, 1 each for Dataflows, Datasets, and Reports (each with different access control lists)
  • 2 Power BI Dataflows
  • 1 Power BI Dataset
  • 2 Power BI Reports

Here’s what I inherited:

I’ve been asked to make recommendations later today on the use of deployment pipelines to move the code between environments, and, as it’s my first-time using deployment pipelines, I setup a quick test that seemed to suggest a single workspace per environment may be preferred by the corporate IT resources who will be doing the deployment (i.e., less work for them). So I wanted to ask the forum members a quick question:

  • should I keep 3 separate workspaces per environment, OR
  • should I have 1 workspace per environment (containing 2 dataflows, 1 dataset, and 2 reports)

Which do you think is best? Any other thoughts would also be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Greg

Hi @Greg,
I’m just telling you this with the intention of learning about workspaces and pipelines and based on what I’ve read.

Is the current configuration made up of 9 workspaces?
WS_Dataflows_DEV
WS_Datasets_DEV
WS_Reports_DEV

WS_Dataflows_TEST
WS_Datasets_TEST
WS_Reports_TEST

WS_Dataflows_PROD
WS_Datasets_PROD
WS_Reports_PROD

When using pipelines, should we create 3 pipelines?

Pipeline_Dataflows:
WS_Dataflows_DEV,
WS_Dataflows_TEST,
WS_Dataflows_PROD

Pipeline_Datasets:
WS_Datasets_DEV,
WS_Datasets_TEST,
WS_Datasets_PROD

Pipeline_Reports:
WS_Reports_DEV,
WS_Reports_TEST,
WS_Reports_PROD

In case of using a workspace per environment, we would have only 3 workspaces:
WS_DEV
WS_TEST
WS_PROD

And a single Pipeline:
Pipeline: WS_DEV, WS_TEST, WS_PROD

I think that the configuration of the workspaces should be done based on the audience to which the content of each of them is directed.
I was reading the following article in case it can help you.

Regards,

Thanks @jafernandezpuga for the thought/links. Yes there are 9 workspaces now (3 per environment) so there will be 3 deployment pipelines to setup.
Greg

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Hi @Greg,

Did the response above help solve your query?

If not, can you let us know where you’re stuck and what additional assistance you need?

If it did, please mark the answer that helped you as the SOLUTION.

Thank you

Thanks @EnterpriseDNA … while @jafernandezpuga’s comments are more than a direction, the client couldn’t define the reporting audiences (“just give us the report”), so we chose as simple a workspace layout as possible and are using 1 per environment, so 3 in total. Regardless, Jose’s answer helped and has been marked as the solution. Thanks, Greg

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