One development environment per developer

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Sven_Rahn

Hi,

as I understand a good way to customize Dataverse with multiple developers would be to have one dev environment per developer (or even per feature). Right now we have three environments for most customers: Dev, Test and Prod. We automated the deployment using DevOps and the PAC CLI which works great. We use one big solution for all customizations.

My goal is to have a new DevOps pipeline which creates a new dev environment from a specific commit in the solution repository. I thought using the environment type "developer" would be a good approach but I can't install the sales module there (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/developer/create-developer-environment). Is there any way to work around this? Or do I really have to create a new sandbox environment?

Using sandbox environments would get expensive quickly, especially when using a new environment for each new feature.

How do you deal with this? Is this even the right approach?

Greatings!

Categories:

Power Apps Pro Dev & ISV

I have the same question (0)

All responses (3)

Answers (0)

Sort by

Suggested answer

Pstork1 69,417 Most Valuable Professional on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Even if you could find a way around the limitation you have identified, you'll still have an issue because you can only have 3 developer environments per person. That's a hard limit. There really is no other way than using sandbox environments.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If this Post helped you, please click "Does this answer your question" and give it a like to help others in the community find the answer too!

Paul Papanek Stork, MVP
Blog: https://www.dontpapanic.com/blog

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Sunil Kumar Pashikanti 2,095 Moderator on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!

Hi @Sven_Rahn,

As @Pstork1 suggested, we have only one option to go with Sandbox environment, but instead of going individual sandbox for each developer, you can go with a Shared Sandbox approach.

Why it’s cost-effective:

Sandbox environments are “paid” only in the sense that they consume Dataverse capacity, not per-user cost.
Dataverse capacity determines whether you can create more sandboxes.
Therefore one shared sandbox dramatically reduces cost compared to giving every developer an individual sandbox.

Automation possible:
You can automate provisioning of Sandbox environments using:
Power Platform Admin Center APIs
PAC CLI
Azure DevOps pipelines

This is commonly done for:
creating fresh sandboxes
restoring backups
copying data from PROD → DEV
exporting/importing solutions automatically

Was this reply helpful? Yes No
Suggested answer

11manish 2,286 on at

Like (0)

Report
Copy link

Link copied!
Because your solution depends on Dynamics 365 Sales, Developer environments cannot be used.
The practical approaches are:

Use a shared DEV environment with feature branches (most common).

Use temporary sandbox environments created by pipeline for testing.

Break the large solution into smaller feature solutions to reduce conflicts.

Creating one environment per developer is usually not necessary and rarely used for Dynamics 365 projects due to cost and complexity.

Was this reply helpful? Yes No