CI/CD and the Centre of Excellence – How Nevermore Automates the Chaos

If you’ve followed along with Nevermore Technology’s journey so far, you’ve seen the structure. The environments. The solutions. The carefully managed app sprawl.

But how does all of that actually move through the pipeline? How do they avoid “oh no, we forgot that environment variable again” or “this version worked in Dev, why is it broken in Prod?”

Answer: CI/CD pipelines, sitting neatly inside their Centre of Excellence (CoE) instance.

Let’s unpack it.

What Lives in Instance 3?

This isn’t an app instance. This is an operational control centre. Here’s what Nevermore hosts in CoE:

• Power Platform Pipelines
• The full CoE Starter Kit
• Secrets and service connections (with appropriate governance)
• Monitoring dashboards and Power BI reports
• Maker analytics, environment insights, and DLP enforcement tooling

Basically, this instance is the adult in the room.

Power Platform Pipelines: The Real MVP

Nevermore uses Microsoft’s Power Platform Pipelines—because once you’re deploying managed solutions across 20 environments, clicking “Export” and “Import” just doesn’t cut it.

Pipelines are configured per instance, per stage:

• Dev to Test: auto-deploy on push
• Test to Pre-Prod: manual approval via pipeline run
• Pre-Prod to Prod: scheduled release windows with rollback points

And yes, they do include pre- and post-deployment steps:

• Pre: Test solution validity, validate connections, update environment variables
• Post: Notify owners, tag version history, run smoke tests

[Placeholder for Image: Screenshot of pipeline stages showing approval gates and deployment logs]

The ALM Accelerator: Templates and Guardrails

To help dev teams across the company build and deploy consistently, Nevermore uses the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform from the CoE Starter Kit.

This gives them:

• Pipelines for Canvas and Model-Driven apps
• Branching and pull request templates
• Automated solution export, build, and deployment
• Support for connection references, environment variables, and custom connectors

You can grab it here: ALM Accelerator GitHub

What’s better is that the Accelerator includes maker-ready interfaces—meaning business users can kick off pipeline actions without having to touch Azure DevOps or GitHub directly.

Managing Secrets Without Fear

All pipelines rely on service principals, connection references, and—if you’re brave—API keys. Nevermore uses:

• Azure Key Vault
• Connection references wrapped in solutions
• Environment variables to store values that change per stage

This way, an app that connects to staging.crm.nevermoretech.com in Test will seamlessly point to crm.nevermoretech.com in Production—without anyone having to edit a Power Automate flow by hand.

Goodbye, “forgot to change the connector” incidents.

Telemetry, Dashboards and Alerts

CI/CD isn’t just about deployment—it’s about visibility. Nevermore’s CoE instance feeds real-time deployment stats into a Power BI dashboard, showing:

• Deployment durations
• Solution sizes
• Number of pipeline runs per week
• Failures (and which poor soul caused them)

They’ve even added Teams notifications for failed runs—because nothing motivates careful deployments like a public Teams callout.

Keeping the Makers in Line (Nicely)

CoE doesn’t just deploy. It governs.

Using the CoE Starter Kit, Nevermore tracks:

• Who’s creating new apps
• What connectors are being used
• Which environments are active
• Orphaned resources
• Apps with no owners (which get flagged, fast)

And yes, they’ve configured Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies so that external connectors like Twitter, Dropbox, or anything marked “definitely not business critical” are blocked by default.

[Placeholder for Image: Screenshot of the CoE Dashboard in Power BI with app usage and DLP status]

TL;DR – This Is Where the Magic Happens

Instance 3 may not have sexy apps or customer journeys, but it’s the unsung hero of Nevermore’s Power Platform strategy.

It gives them:

• Structured, automated deployments
• Enforced environment separation
• Secure, repeatable patterns
• Full visibility into who’s building what and where
• The confidence to scale Power Platform across the entire business

Next Up: Blog 7 – Source Control and Collaboration (or, Why Git Is Your Friend… Eventually)

In the next post, we’ll get into how Nevermore handles source control, branching, and collaboration across different teams. Whether you’re pro-dev, low-code, or “just clicking around,” there’s a place for you in the repo—once you learn how not to break it.