Not too long ago, Microsoft release a deployment pipeline for Power BI. This is really exciting stuff and goes along with the trend in the DevOps world. What is nice to, is was built from the ground up and has room to grow.

What does that mean? If you have a Premium workspace (for now only Premium for production, but can use Power BI embedded for dev/qa), you can setup a CI/CD like system for deploying new or updated Power BI objects from Dev to QA to Prod.

You can create a pipeline, my example is the AdvWorks workspace. It has 10 datasets and 10 reports plus 4 dashboards. Creating from this Dev area can be a AdvWorks (Test) and then deploy to a AdvWorks (Prod). It is really that easy. You have the option to assign the workspace to initially be Dev or QA or Prod. So, t does not matter the stage you start.

You can select what objects are promoted to the next level.

There is an option to change say the data source for the data set at each level for deployments to Dev DB or QA DB or Prod DB.

There is a lot more details than that, but this is an early setup for a new development workspace being worked on. Most users will already have a product and you will have to retro-fit the workspace into a dev area before using this pipeline.

Get started with this and watch the updates from Microsoft about new editions to the pipeline as well as addition fixes to issues report from customers.  Power BI Blog—Updates and News | Microsoft Power BI

NOTE: It does not include Data Flows or other objects, just Data Sets, Reports and Dashboards. An upside, you can deploy an app from each stage. Remember to sync data from refreshes.