The Secret Sauce of Power Apps Lifecycle Management with a Tech Connoisseur - Casey Burke

Mark Smith: 0:32
Welcome to the Power 365 show. We're an interview staff at Microsoft across the Power Platform and Dynamics 365 Technology Stack. I hope you'll find this podcast educational and inspire you to do more with this great technology. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Seattle in the United States. Of course we all know where it is. He works at Microsoft as the principal product manager on Microsoft Power Apps. He currently is leading Power App engineering teams with the focus on enterprise and customer adoption, including application lifecycle management, ci-cd, as well as low code application composition and delivery. You can find links to his bio, social media, etc. In the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, Casey.

Casey Burke: 1:19
Hey, thank you, Mark. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here and catch up with you.

Mark Smith: 1:23
Good to have you on the show. I saw you back at MVP Summit this year and you were speaking a lot around this area of Power Platform Pipelines, alm, and I think it's an important area to unpack. I'm looking at it from the point of view as I'm not a developer, but I am somebody that recommends this technology into very large organizations and then also are involved in that governance model and setting up practices and processes inside enterprise customers to do it right. So I'm coming at probably today from that lens, but before we go there, tell me a bit about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you, those things, when you're not at work?

Casey Burke: 2:08
Yeah, I mean family is definitely what keeps me going. I've wonderful wife, been married for six years now and we have two kids, so boy and a girl ages four and two. So they're a ton of fun. Keep me busy, for sure. Yeah, from the greater Seattle area, actually from a small little island up here called Kamano Island, so I guess we have that in common as well. I was living the island life. Yeah, it was a unique upbringing. I'm just getting to hang out around water and do a boating and fishing and love to get out and go crabbing. Then, also just living in such a beautiful area, I feel really blessed. We have great mountains around here and so at a young age I got really into skiing and I was a punk teenager. Everybody was switching the snowboarding so I joined the bandwagon right and then I got a little bit later in life and I was actually somebody from New Zealand. A good friend got me back into skiing so I bought a pair. Now when I go I'm just going to do both. But I guess on the food front I do a lot of different stuff For me. I love to grill. My wife probably does most of the cooking at the house, but when it comes to barbecue. I set out on a mission a couple years a few years ago now. I cook the perfect steak right, and so it kind of took me a while to get it right and I started hoarding grills. In the process I've got through a few different ones and then started getting into the dry-aged steaks and trying to cook it just perfect. So I think I got it nailed pretty well now, but it's been a lot of fun in the process.

Mark Smith: 3:43
So a couple of questions from that. What do you go to now, after going through a few?

Casey Burke: 3:47
I would say it depends but for steak I definitely like my Traeger. You can really slow cook it and then turn it up and sear it. I cook salmon and stuff like that. I have one of those. Have you seen the ceramic eggs? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I've left to cook on that, get that nice charcoal taste and you can also crank that thing down way low for some of your slow cook stuff. Yeah, kind of different tools for the job, right? Just like? How would platform?

Mark Smith: 4:13
Yeah yeah yeah, yeah. And now my brain's riffing off because you've said another thing before and I'll come back to your salmon, because I learned about salmon in many of my trips to Seattle and I fell in love with it as a fish to eat. And so let's go to your first seasoning. What do you do for seasoning on that salmon?

Casey Burke: 4:32
Oh man, my wife is gonna kill me because I have way too many seasonings.

Mark Smith: 4:36
but Do you make any yourself, though? Sometimes?

Casey Burke: 4:39
yeah, I'll mix them together and stuff Usually just store bought. I love the Traeger seasonings. They have some really good stuff. But yeah, salmon, I like to keep it pretty simple. Just do a lot of butter on there. Sturns will pack it with some brown sugar and salt and pepper and more. You can kind of do some garlic on there and different herbs and things like that. Either way it's gonna taste good, especially if you catch it fresh that day. It's not the better.

Mark Smith: 5:03
Well, the other one is you mentioned crabbing. Tell me about that.

Casey Burke: 5:07
Yeah, so up in this part of the world we have the Dungeon-S crowd and this is something that you know my dad used to take us out as kids, and so every summer it's open. Well, it's kind of a shorter season now, but usually for a couple months out of the summer you can go out and drop crab pots. So we'll take the bow down on. You know, friday after work, go pick the pots up Saturday or something. But yeah, they're pretty good tasting crab. It's, you know, not a king crab or anything like that. I'd say that's probably a little bit better. Either way, the Dungeons aren't bad.

Mark Smith: 5:37
Is it a soft shell? No, not their arm shell yeah, okay, I think I remember trying them when I was in San Fran, on the menu there. But yeah, I think if I had the choice of any meat from the ocean, you're hard pressed. Even though I wouldn't go past, I couldn't go past crab. I think it's even better than lobster in many situations, or crayfish as we call it here in New Zealand. Crab meat is just, yeah, amazing.

Casey Burke: 6:03
It's delicious.

Mark Smith: 6:05
Tell me about how you ended up in Microsoft. What was your career into Microsoft?

Casey Burke: 6:10
Yeah, so I guess been working with the power platform or kind of around the surrounding area since what we used to call CRM 2011. So I guess it's been about 11, 12 years for me and that's kind of my pathway into Microsoft and you know related technologies like Azure and stuff. I was working at a startup back then and so we were kind of a partner, did some stuff in the ISV space and built, you know, various different products, did a lot of things in marketing and so kind of living in that experience you know, when it was a small company, you wear a lot of different hats and so I started as a developer, did some stuff as a test lead solution architect, got into the pre-sales channels and actually a lot of technical product marketing. And that was a really fun space for me and kind of closely related to the PM role in many ways. But we got to do a lot of cool demos and things like that. So, yeah, I think I've been at Microsoft for over six years now, kind of came into when we were the dynamics team back then and then later in the power up. So they've had various different roles around the organization and now most recently focused on application lifecycle management. It's kind of, you know, being from the outside and then coming in. I think it was a really cool opportunity just to be able to change things. You're like, oh man, this has bothered me forever, like we can make that way better, and so that's been a lot of fun and application. My cycle management was one of those areas that you know could use a lot of improvement. If you will.

Mark Smith: 7:41
Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. I take it the company you're talking about is Indigen, which is a New Zealand company, right, the one that you migrated in. So you're involved in building a lot of the demo assets for Microsoft at events back in those days, right yeah?

Casey Burke: 7:57
That was kind of what we lived in Breed, so there's kind of the like website type marketing that we would do. So, if you remember, like the CRM test drive that you'd see on the marketing pages. So, yeah, those are the tools we built out Demo builder, which was something that partners can come in, and, yeah, remember it well, get a pre-built demo. We did a lot of the keynotes for the events and things like that. So it was going down to a lot of different conferences and that was a ton of fun. There's, you know, kind of this funny story. Looking back, we were going up into Canada WPC up there and we had built a bunch of these robots. We're doing like different cognitive services demos with them and we're going across into customs and we're carrying these huge briefcases, which is like broken down robots, and they're looking at us like what the heck are you bringing across the border right now? They're like, oh, microsoft, like fine, come on through.

Mark Smith: 8:54
Yeah, was that a Microsoft partner conference you're going to?

Casey Burke: 8:58
Yeah, I think it was the 2012 or 2016. Oh gosh, that must have been 2012. It'll be one of the two because I went to both. Okay, nice, both those conferences. So yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 9:09

I know them well. 2016, particularly because we won a worldwide partner of the year and got to have Luns Rosaccia and, as part of that, so very memorable, my times in Canada, 2012, I think was my first ever global partner conference with Microsoft, so it's interesting. Intigent Small Company from New Zealand, but boy, they really paved the way for Dynamics. You know business applications as it came to market in New Zealand and I think they're a really awesome example of a small company that you know played big out in New Zealand and really, you know, got into Seattle and did so much work for Microsoft. Hey, michelle, jay Timberton, great guys in the business.

Casey Burke: 9:49
Absolutely.

Mark Smith: 9:51
Tell me about ALM, tell me about pipelines, tell me about your thinking. And you know one of the common questions I get is when do I go pipelines? Where do I, you know, with managed environments? How do I think about ALM and how do I think about it in the context also of things like GitHub, devops all being in play? Should I even be worried about power platform pipelines if the enterprise nature of our business as that, we are predominantly using Zer DevOps? Tell me how you answer that question to where people should play and how they should think about pipelines in that full lifecycle management.

Casey Burke: 10:30
Yeah, maybe the best way to talk to that is sharing a little bit of the historical context and how the tools have evolved over time and kind of how we got here. So, if you want to break that down a little bit, you know, maybe there's like three different generations of ALM tooling over time and you could probably argue four, because there's like, if you go back to CRM forward, we didn't have solutions yet and people kind of had to do their own thing with SQL scripting and whatnot. But yeah, so we started with CRM. 2011 was when solutions came in and you know we had the manual export import capability right. So that was kind of the first generally, if you will, and you know we modernized that a few years, of course, but after that came in the tooling side. So we started producing first party developer focus tools, so things like package employer solution package or the configuration migration utility, and then, a little bit after that, started packaging that into like the first party build tools that we have and power platform CLI, right, and so those you know integrated really well with Azure, devops and GitHub and we also had a ton of great community tools out there that folks could use dogman, 30 lm process, and it made it super powerful, especially for, you know, pro dev led type projects, right, or code first developer one projects. What had kind of changed as you get into this next generation, though, was a couple of themes that were overlapping, and first of all is you start thinking about the center of excellence, right, and really scaling out power platform across your entire organization and wanting central body or system to be able to govern that at scale right, so we had that, and then the platform also started focusing more and more around connectivity. So think about it today we have more than 1000 connectors out there, and a lot of the components are using those every day, even in large scale projects, and so that's really where Azure DevOps and get upstarted to break down for the needs of the LLM platform, to be able to really orchestrate a lm in a cohesive way, without breaking the automated fashion of what Azure DevOps really is right, and a lot of that's because, if you think about things like personal connections a lot of connections you can't create those programmatically. You need Mark sitting in the chair in an interactive session. That's creating that connection right, and that's the vast majority of the things in the platform, and so that's where we get into this kind of hybrid model where, you know, citizen developer Mark, sitting in his chair, can, in just a couple clicks, initiate a deployment. It logs you into all your connections for you, and then we carry out the deployment in automated fashion. So that's kind of how it evolved and where we sit in that space. You know, it's not super like ProDev or code first, developer first. It's not the most advanced system, you know, and you compare it to like Azure DevOps and things, because that's just, you know, totally designed for CI, cd and large scale projects, right? So that's kind of where it sits and we've been working to. You know, like we don't want this to be a separate tool set. So even with a lot of the recent announcements that we've made around, like pipelines, extensibility and things, we see them as being a complement to each other, and so it's like start with pipelines and power platform and then extend it out with our developer tools as your needs grow and as the size of your project grows.

Mark Smith: 14:45
Yeah, I was on a call yesterday with Dave Yak and one of the things that we were discussing is does this really fit for the organization that perhaps doesn't have a in Azure maturity? They don't have a development team over in DevOps and therefore this is kind of the thing they need to. It'll get them well down the path of having good rigor in their application lifecycle management. But for an enterprise organization let's say they've got multiple technologies and play, you know, pega, appian Blue Prism any number of tooling out there and they've already got a solid Azure DevOps process and now they're bringing Power Platform into that mix. Would that then, in their scenario, be a better fit to use those what their traditional Azure? Because they're not looking at so much the citizen developer and play here, they're looking for traditional developers building apps at scale on the Power Platform, Kind of like what you talked about back in the Dynamics CRM days, right, where we had XRM, we would build big enterprise applications on Dynamics 365 sales, right. It was just that we turned them into something else, and I'm wondering is that where you kind of see it fitting more in the pure play people that the Power Platform is a key ecosystem they're developing but they're not necessarily mature in other development processes or tooling?

Casey Burke: 16:09
I would say it's for the customer that wants to manage ALM across their entire organization, across citizen developers. When you get into more project focused ALM or, like you said, some of the more advanced use cases, right where they do have a full team of devs and they're doing something very specific, azure DevOps is going to be a lot more flexible to really extend it in the ways that you need to meet those specific needs. So I believe fully and use the best tool for the job and I think that for those types of projects, azure DevOps is the best tool for the job. But when it comes down to really scaling and coming kind of coming up with the process for your entire organization, that's where the pipeline is the better fit.

Mark Smith: 16:55
Right, so let's unpack that right. We've known for a long time the default environment has got overcrowded, everyone's knocking elbows at each other. They're not bringing that into an ALM conversation, and so is pipelines part of that journey, where you're saying getting people they don't know about ALM, right, they're a citizen developer, they're building solutions, they've been building for a while, but now you want to make sure that the HR department if they're building something, they're building in the HR environment and the ALM, the rigor around dev, test, quality control, that type of thing is happening in those environments inside that group, and that your new starters, your newcomers that have clicked on that little button and SharePoint that says let's build an app or something like that, or they go to build. They don't know anything about environments, so I don't know where they are. Is that where this really comes into play? At making sure you, from a governance perspective, put them in the right place so that it can be managed in a structured way. Moving forward.

Casey Burke: 17:55
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you think about somebody just starting in their journey, right, they want to learn the tool set and build something that's useful. And default environment can be okay for kind of a playground for personal productivity type scenarios right. But as maybe your app scales or you want to build additional apps and actually share them with more people in your organization, it becomes increasingly important to not break that app in production when you have people that depend on it for their, you know, doing their day to day job, right, yeah, and then we start thinking about how do we make an ALM process more approachable to those citizen developers so it's really easy for them to now get a dedicated development environment. They can make their iterations there, deploy that in a couple clicks to a test environment and hammer on it, make sure everything works and then you shift the update to your users in production and that is super important so that we can keep the quality and performance and all those benefits that you get out of an ALM process. Keep that intact and make sure that your end users are happy, because really that's what's at even the business value at the end of the day.

Mark Smith: 19:06
To use some terms from history, like solutions, managed and unmanaged, package deploy you mentioned before, which I've sent in many sessions of Matt Barber over my career where he really championed the package deployer Are those things still in existence in the context of pipelines? How do you think of that? How does those concepts of manage and unmanaged, of packaged deploy, et cetera, where do they fit now in this modern pipeline world?

Casey Burke: 19:34
So just saying now, matt Barber is still pushing package deploy very hard. It's a great toolset and actually it's used A lot of things that you probably don't see. So, if you think about, if you use the new catalog feature, it's using packaged deploy or it's a service on the back end. If you install something from AppSource, it's using packaged deploy on the back end, and catalog system and pipelines are actually they share a lot of the same infrastructure today and we have future plans for you and bringing that a lot closer together, and so, really, these systems that are already in place are going to be more cohesive and so, even though you might not see packaged deploy or think about packaged deploy, a lot of those constructs are still actually there. So, no, it's not going anywhere, but it's definitely evolved in a different way than the client tool. That probably know.

Mark Smith: 20:29
Yeah, exactly Approvals when access is not available to target environments. Tell me about that.

Casey Burke: 20:35
That's a great topic and it's been one of the biggest asks that we've had since we released pipelines, because customers want to lock down their production environments. You can't give all these citizen developers basically system admin access, because then they can do whatever they want and it introduces a lot of risk to the business, and we have especially a lot of customers that work. They have a lot of compliance restrictions, they have to play it, undergo regular audits and things like that, and so it becomes increasingly as important. So what we're actually rolling up right now is a feature we're calling delegated deployments and what that is. It takes fundamentals or best practices from traditional software development, like deploying through a service principal account. So that's exactly what we're bringing in, but in a much more approachable way. So as an admin, you know that it's a service principal when you set it up and you sign that admin permissions in the target environment. But as a citizen developer, their experience looks exactly like it does today, and so they can have zero access to the target environment and still be able to deploy there. And of course it requires an approval Right. We don't just let them deploy the thing that they want, and a lot of our customers want the citizen developer to be an end user of the application as well. So what that kind of translates to is you assign them the basic user role, so they have zero permission to edit anything in the production environment, but they can request an appointment there. They can set up their connections during the deployment and once it goes through then they can actually have access to run the app and share it out with other business users as well. Yeah, so. I'm really excited about this one.

Mark Smith: 22:15
It's Any resources people should go look to get up to speed on that, yeah, so look for some announcements actually right around the MPPC timeframe for the specific feature.

Casey Burke: 22:29
Keep an eye on the pipeline's documentation too on our learn site and you'll see some blog posts coming out. For those that are going down to MPPC, we're doing some workshops. I think it binds on Monday. We're gonna be doing this and you'll be able to get hands on with the new feature sets that are coming out, and then we're gonna be showing it up on big stage. Also, come and find me, and if you're not going to MPPC, then definitely keep an eye out for the blog.

Mark Smith: 22:55
Yeah, awesome. Unfortunately, this podcast is not gonna be published till after MPPC, so you're gonna be able to go and find everything it has talked about. It's the recordings, et cetera will be there for you. Go check it out. You talked about how identity before and connections and how they move across environments and things. Tell me a bit about managed identities and how does that work and what are you thinking around that area?

Casey Burke: 23:19
Yeah, so with the delegated deployments and there's several areas of this right. We started without managed identity, so it'll be service principle or what you can think of as like a service account. So that would be an interactive user. It could be large or it could be 0123 at Contosocom. That's your service account, right? Yeah, so that can be the identity that runs the deployment. We're definitely thinking about managed identities could have gone that route. We have a lot of customers that everybody knows that managed identities are the future. No one wants to rotate their certificates and all that stuff, but a lot of organizations, especially larger organizations, that might be a little bit slower moving, that they just haven't gotten there yet right and so kind of where the demand is. But managed identities are definitely in our back pocket. I think we'll probably end it, end up adding it here fairly soon. The other side of that is when you think about the connections of selves, right, so a lot more connectors will support service principles and the future. So think about you have a Cloudflow that's actually part of an enterprise application. We don't want that running under Mark's connection. We want that running under a service principle, right yeah, so you'll see more and more of that. Unfortunately, the connectors are backed by the API of a different system and not all of them support service principles, so it's going to have that constraint, but we'll do what we can where it is supported.

Mark Smith: 24:50
Yeah, the final area I wanted to talk to you about was how one should be thinking about source code integration. What are your thoughts there?

Casey Burke: 24:59
Yeah, that's always a hot topic. And I have to tread a little bit carefully on this one, just because it's still kind of early in the thinking and some of the things that we want to do in the future. But what I will say is think about what pipelines are today as part of a much broader story for in-product DLM. So pipelines are very much focused on the deployment process, but ALM there's a bigger picture around that. Think about we need things like automated testing and we need version control systems in place, right and so, as you think about it that way, as we expand out what in-product DLM means, you'll start to see those other capabilities come in and, granted, some of these are further along than others, but that really is our North Star to land it across the board. And so it works natively for every type of maker on our platform. And going back to that early conversation, not having to make the choice around it's a small project, it's a large project, yeah, yeah, and choose from the tool sets right, like everything will really start. Our vision for this is that everything is natively available. So really exciting. We have our work cut out for us.

Mark Smith: 26:15
Yeah, you touched on automated testing there. Do you see? This is probably one of the biggest areas that generative AI could come into play in the near term to really impact quality testing, implementing best practices around it. And I suppose I'll add to that question when do you see generative AI playing into everything that we've discussed today?

Casey Burke: 26:37
You must have been talking to Cartek.

Mark Smith: 26:40
I wasn't. I haven't talked to him yet.

Casey Burke: 26:42
OK, ok OK.

Mark Smith: 26:43
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Casey Burke: 26:45
I don't want to steal his thunder or anything, but that's definitely something we've been putting a lot of thought into and it's a really exciting space actually. It's going to play around with it and see in what's possible on that front. So absolutely it's something that we're thinking about kind of hammering on. We're going to hackathon this week where a lot of folks were playing with different things like that, and so nothing concrete at the moment. A lot of that's still just kind of envisioning what could be. But definitely keep an eye on that space and, yeah, we definitely catch up with Cartek and he'll be able to fill you in on what their findings were.

Mark Smith: 27:19
I just think that in my mind it's somewhere where I think the use cases just so play into and the quality that could be achieved with it could be phenomenal really, the catches it could create before stuff goes into production and stuff. I just think, yeah, it's definitely some exciting space and I know we'll see a lot more.

Casey Burke: 27:41
It really is, because thinking about writing selenium-based tests or if you probably just easy repro, there was a lot of scripting involved and that's very specific, and so a lot of citizen devs aren't going to do that in the first place. But also there's a certain cost associated with that, and so it has to be a larger mission critical application. And so AI I think the opportunities are fascinating there, where it could actually auto generate the set of test cases. Correct Takes that problem away altogether, right.

Mark Smith: 28:14
Yes, yeah, exciting. Anything we haven't covered today that we should have in your mind.

Casey Burke: 28:19
So talked about some cool new features coming out. If you haven't seen it already, I would go check out the extensions and actually the AI co-pilot that we recently released for pipelines. So there's some examples on the docs as well for integrating pipelines and power platform with some other examples there, but it really opens up the possibilities for what you can do and integrate with your homegrown systems and even customized processes that you have in place for application lifecycle management. So we'd love for folks to go check that out and for those of you, well, I guess this will come out after MPPC, but yeah, anyways, it's been a pleasure, mark, really appreciate you having me here.

Mark Smith: 29:02
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP, mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show from Microsoft, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash. Nz365 guy, how will you create on the power platform today? Ciao.