Default Environment – How to handle?

As we’re all aware, the default (Power Platform) environment in any Azure tenant is a very ‘interesting’ thing to have. It’s there by default when an Azure tenant is created, all users within the Azure tenant automatically have access to it, we’re not able to restrict users from being in it, etc etc.

Though it’s able to be backed up, it’s not able to be restored over itself, there’s no SLA/support available on it….the list goes on & on…!

Many of us have come up against issues caused by people using the default environment whilst not knowing about challenges involving it, which usually results in pulling out our hair, banging our head against the wall, and other like-minded productive approaches.

However, it is the first place that users, being new to Power Platform, land up, and instinctively they’ll start building applications, automations etc within it (though usually without using solutions as a container for the development of items). So to date, there’s not really anything that’s been able to be done around this, apart from monitoring users & chasing them after the fact.

Now, we’re all about enabling our users in the right way, helping educate & support them. Telling them a big NO doesn’t help, and can even be an initial blocker to having people start playing around & building technological solutions.

So how can we go about enabling our users, but also having the appropriate level of governance over the top? Well, there are several steps that I think we can take, which will help us with these. Now, not all of these are yet in place, though they have been talked about publicly. So let’s go take a look at them

1. The first step, in my mind, is to start off with enabling the default environment as a managed environment (yes, this can ACTUALLY be done!). Managed environments have many different properties associated with them, but the one of most interest (for this at least) is the requirement to have a premium license in place.

All users within an organisation should by default have an M365 license SKU against them (usually this would be an E3 or E5). Users with these can immediately use the seeded Power Platform capabilities within them to create Power Platform collateral (using standard connector capabilities). However, with the default environment being managed, they will NOT be able to access it!

Note: For the moment, I’m leaving out users who have premium Power Platform licenses – this is deliberate

2. Environment routing. Announced recently is the environment routing capabilities. This will enable users to be automatically routed to an appropriate environment, based on various conditions that can be set. With this, we could create appropriate business unit ‘sandboxes’, and we could route users to these. The user experience would be that when logging in, they would automatically then go to the right environment, rather than trying to work out which environment they should actually go to. This will save on confusion, and be a good user experience (in my opinion).

3. Just-In-Time (JIT) Environment Creation. One of the items mentioned by Charles Lamanna at the European Power Platform Conference 2023 in Dublin is a new capability that’s coming in soon (I hope!). From the sound of it, this will give the ability to automatically create a new environment for users who do not already have one.

This sounds really cool. With the recent advent of Development Environments (& the ability for all users to have multiples of these), this could work REALLY well with the environment routing capability mentioned above. When a user would log in for the first time, it could look to see if they have a developer environment – if yes, then route them to it. But if the user didn’t, then to automatically spin up & create a new developer environment, and route them to it.

Now there are some caveats with this approach, leaving aside that some of the functionality isn’t GA yet.

It would mean that organisations would need to be alright with changing the default environment to become a managed environment. Obviously, risk assessments would need to be carried out with this, and non-premium solutions migrated elsewhere.

It’s also important to call out that organisations which have a CDS 1.0 implementation (ie before Power Platform became GA etc) will only have the ability to upgrade default to managed. They are not able to downgrade back to an unmanaged default environment, given limitations of the original CDS implementation (I’ve heard some truly HORRIFIC stories around this, so be careful!)

The above, however, is just the start of things. There are many other concepts to keep in mind, such as Landing Zones, Policies, etc. I’m going to be looking to cover these in upcoming posts, so keep an eye out for them!