{Did you know} Application Lifecycle Management Environment strategy

Hello Everyone,

Today i am to share my views on the ALM Environment Strategy.

Lets gets started.

ALM Principles: It needs individual environments for app or solution development and production.

So basically basic ALM can be performed with Development and Production environments.

Best practise is to have atleast one Test environment which is separate from development and production environment.

Some organisations use other environments like UAT(user acceptance testing) system integration testing(SIT) and training too.

Why development environment?

Because any development for app or solution can be done on it and also we check the changes. Separate environments helpful to reduce issues when a developer affects another while making changes. 

Development environments?

You can discuss this like how many development environments required? here

Similarly you can provision environments from source code? here

What are the dependencies on my environments? here

ALM other considerations?

ALM should have a minimum of DEVELOPMENT, UAT AND PRODUCTION environments as any changes made on the development environment can be tested in the UAT and prior to deploying to Production.

Multiple geographical environments?

Power Platform have service updates frequently so service update schedule as environments are updated across the globe.

According to Microsoft there are total six stations, its defined by geographical location.

So any service update is done in sequencial order for example: station 3 service updates are applied before station 4. 

i.e so its common for environments that are in different stations to have different versions at a certain point in time.

Things to be considered when importing the solution and environment version:

1. You can import newer version into an environment than the environment where the solution was exported.

2. We can't import a solution into an environment that's an older version than the environment where the solution was exported. Because there might be some missing components or required funtionality in the older environment.

Aligning environments with service update stations:

                                                                Image source Microsoft

Suppose we have a production environments in Canada and the United States. In that case your development environments should be in North America(station 5) and not in Canada (Station 2). so that your development environments will always be the same or an earlier version than your production environments, which will decrease solution import version conflicts.

I hope this helps.

Malla Reddy(@UK365GUY)

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