Best Practices for Content Preparation in Microsoft Fabric

To effectively manage your content throughout its lifecycle, make sure to review this information before:

• Releasing content to production.
• Setting up a deployment pipeline for a workspace.

When managing content throughout its lifecycle, especially in Microsoft Fabric, it's important to plan each step carefully before moving to production. Let’s use a simple example of an e-commerce company launching a new feature to explain how deployment pipelines work.

Separate Development Between Teams

Teams often work on different parts of a project. In this case, the development team is working on a new feature. They have their own workspace where they can make changes and test their code without affecting others.

For example, the development team might be trying out new ways to display products in their own workspace, which is separate from the one the testing team uses.

Plan Your Permission Model

Each workspace needs specific permissions. For example:

• The development team works on the feature and has access to a Git repository to store their code.
• The testing team only reviews the feature when it’s ready and doesn’t need access to the repository.
• The production team handles the final deployment, ensuring only authorized people can release it live.

Connect Different Stages to Different Databases

Each stage of development should connect to a different database:

• Development database: The development team uses a non-Prod database for testing.
• Testing database: The testing team uses a database that’s similar to production but doesn’t contain real data.
• Production database: Once everything is ready, the feature connects to the live database with real customer data.

This keeps the live data safe while allowing the team to test their work properly.

Use Parameters for Configuration Changes

Parameters are settings that can change depending on whether you're in development, testing, or production. For instance, the connection to the database might change, but by using parameters, the transition between stages is smooth. This means the same code can work in different environments by just adjusting a few settings.

Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/cicd/best-practices-cicd