COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

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Posted on by DerekHurley

I want to find out what are the best practices for setting up a centre of excellence (COE). Should I use a service account, different from my personal account, for our COE? For importing of all the COE starter kit components and then use of these. As far as I understand this has a few benefits:

You can give the service account all needed permissions, so none of the flows, canvas apps, etc will run into any issues.
The COE will not be tied to an individual users account in case they leave the business

Does anyone have experience with this and what would you say is the best practice, and why?

Thanks

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velegandla 202 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

@IPC_ahaas
We are using a service account that got the licenses and identity requirements as mentioned here.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/guidance/coe/setup#what-identity-should-i-install-the-coe-starter-kit-with

Its a best practice not to use personal account for starter kit installation given people always move and it creates more problems with changing accounts.

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IPC_ahaas 1,278 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

I find it highly discouraging that in the documentation for setting up the COE, it makes no mention of what account should be used to create the connections. I would think that would be a critical piece of the puzzle. Especially when it took Microsoft years to add the ability to change ownership of an App which (I believe) must then be within a "Solution" (wonderful terminology Microsoft /s).
trash_panda 6 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

Hi guys 🙂

I had the same question about the best practice when implementing CoE Starter Kit - if it's recommended to use some kind of service account for the connection in the flows or even the whole installation. But the discussion here turned to an another direction after a while 🙂

So if I might go back to the original question. What is recommended then? To have a principal user to not consume a CDS license and what with other connections in the CoE flows then? To have a "service account" for them without premium license?
I am very new in this topic and I would really appreciate your advise.

I have used my admin account for the installation and now I am puzzled if I haven't done anything wrong, because when I share the flows with AD security group for admins, everyone will use my credentials for running flows 😕

Thank you
Joel CustomerEffective 3,224 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

But the licensing requirements to use power apps with azure sql are the same as cds. I don’t get your point. Storage capacity? But the storage capacity required for coe starter kit are small and would fit within your base allotment. So what is the point? You can’t use azure sql with office seeded power apps.
jhall_IUH 39 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

@jlindstrom Per COE data storage, as I stated, we're a .NET development team. They (and I) find it fairly annoying that we cannot (for free) plug PowerApps into web services hosted in Azure and/or Azure SQL data stores that they are maintaining for other projects. This is already a path they are following to write Microsoft checks, why suddenly pay to access something we're already paying for in some other way? Why the unique licensing model for an organization who already bought into the ecosystem?
I understand Microsoft's reasoning here. I recognize that they want to pitch this to orgs w/o formalized Dev teams/processes. By lowering the bar for staffing (and subsequent costs of said staff), they want their cut of the savings.
If the COE kit included spinning up a data model within an existing Azure SQL instance and no licensing hit beyond usage, then my team would just enable that tomorrow w/o pushback. It would be an easy sales pitch.
Even though that would likely wind up more expensive than the per-user licensing for what we'd do at that scale. It is more that it is an identical model/method to what they use for other data storage solutions across the enterprise.
jhall_IUH 39 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

@jlindstrom Yes, the blood sugar one is but one of many that occurred during this period. Many others remain.
Primarily, my point was that Microsoft's version of using data models to build out apps fits more w/ supplanting traditional development workstreams vs. accommodating these kinds of small applications and/or emergency applications. What I've adapted around is to allow a progressive deployment that doesn't force restrictive assumptions at the start. There is no doubt that other applications required enhancement (e.g. a Nurse skills-gathering and volunteer submittal for accepting deployment in Covid-related care areas which rolled out to 8k nurses in the span of a week) and ultimately a better data store. But in these scenarios it still allows for immediately deployment while the data side of things matures as the needs escalate.
Many of the policies/restrictions around traditional development are to protect developers (a scarce resource). When we lower the bar for who can be "a developer" on these kinds of platforms, those assumptions change.
Joel CustomerEffective 3,224 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

but cds is central to the COE> You need a database to store your app entity, etc, as well as the more enterprise grade governance components. Where would you store that stuff?
Joel CustomerEffective 3,224 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

You are saying that you don't need scalability because you have a staff of .net developers so you are not using the platform for those solutions. That's fine, but not everybody has that. Nobody is taking away the tools you have now or saying that you have to use CDS. Just because you don't want to use the platform for that, doesn't mean other people don't.

I don't get why you are so offended by CDS, if you don't need it. To flourish this platform needs to be viable for more mission critical apps and low code apps.
jhall_IUH 39 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

@jlindstrom And that's kind of where we're talking past each other. I don't begrudge the usage of the CDS where justified. I don't specifically begrudge the costs of the COE starter kit for a handful of CDS-enabled licenses. What I started the point around was that Microsoft does all of these things built upon the CDS when it isn't required. As is the case of the COE Starter Kit.
They're greasing the pole very actively and obviously. As someone who is very aware of this, it actively slows adoption for our organization, because all of leadership is afraid of if/when the bill will arrive w/o a clearly attributable benefit. I must constantly convince people to adopt the platform, while also actively trying to stop them from adopting it in the way Microsoft is pitching it.
Joel CustomerEffective 3,224 on at

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Re: COE Best Practices: Should I use a service account?

As to your scenario about blood sugar. That is a really good example. Seriously that is an amazing use case. Agree you don't have time to do a big design before building that scenario if you need it quickly.

But that doesn't mean that's the permanent solution for the issue. The building is on fire, we need to put the fire out. But once the fire is out it's important to think about the long term solution and ensure that it will scale. The Band-aid isn't always the best permanent solution