Power Platform Community Forum Thread Details

Hello Everyone.

I wanted to know about environments in Power Platform.

I want to make 3 environments. One for developing, one for testing and one for production.

So for development what environment should I prefer Developer or Sandbox or Default? [Also give explanation please]

So what exactly is the difference between the above three??

I have heard that Sandbox has copy and reset feature. So, with copy feature can I copy all the apps, flows etc from Developing environment to Testing environment without adding the apps, flows to solutions?? So should I prefer Sandbox for developing as well as I will have to transfer them to testing environment??? Also why we use Reset feature??

And I also read Sandbox environment can be converted from sandbox to production and vice versa. Is it a good technique???

According to me, I should keep them separate only.

And at end I want to ask about environment variables. How important they are? Can we make solutions and transfer it another solution without environment variables? Is it necessary to have environment variables or we can ignore them? What is the actual theory behind making environment variables and using them??

Please dont provide any links of blogs, posts etc or a you tube video. I have seen many.

I need real experience here. The limitations of using some of the environments mentioned above. The limitation of copy feature in a sandbox environment and can I prefer it over making solutions.

Thanks. 🙂 😉

Categories:

Governance & administering

Hi @Unknown123,

The default environment is included with all tenants and is not able to be locked down, all licensed users have maker privileges and you cannot change this. So you should limit the use of it if possible.

Developer environments are free but have a few limitations (many of the previous limitations have been lifted/improved) such as no Dataflows, lower API limits/storage, you can't reset the environment (you have to delete then recreate), and only one developer environment per user (there was an announcement that this will be increased eventually). They are best served for personal development and learning, or in some cases a small team could use it for project development.

You would convert from sandbox to production or vice versa when you need to restore a backup. To protect from accidental data loss, you are not allowed to restore over a production environment. You either have to restore a copy of the backup to a different sandbox environment and promote to production, or demote your current production to sandbox, restore, then promote it back to production.

Environment variables are good if you need to add configuration that is different per environment. There are still some challenges/limitations with them which are described here.

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