Developer Environment Deletion!

Strong title for a blog post, right? Well, I did want to catch your attention! So what exactly are we talking about here?

For the last few years, it’s been possible for users to sign up for a ‘Developer’ plan, which gives them a full capability Power Platform environment for free (though with some limitations to them). This used to be be called the ‘Community’ plan, and is an amazing resource for everyone, whether they’re a professional or citizen developer, to have their own personal ‘sandpit’ to play in, and try things out.

Let’s wind back a few months in time now – earlier this year, Microsoft announced that users would be able to create THREE of these Developer environments, rather than having just a single one! This was mind blowing news, and something that has been extremely welcomed. If you’re wanting to see more on the announcement, Phil Topness has a great video on it at Dataverse Environments For Everyone – New Developer Plan – Power CAT Live – YouTube.

Incidentally, I’m curious as to how much storage space Microsoft has in the background to handle these. After all, each environment takes up a minimum of 1GB of space (& can grow to 2 GB). That means that each user could have 6GB of storage being used….which when multiplied, gives a VERY large number!

Microsoft has now announced that these developer environments, however, need to be utilisied. Ie if they’ve been created, but aren’t being used, Microsoft is going to delete them! Now, from a certain perspective, this is actually quite good – after all, there are all of the storage considerations for environments that have been created, but not being used. However from a different perspective, this could be a problem. What about if you’re doing something occasionally in an environment, but not too often? What about if you decide to go on a ‘Round the World’ cruise for several months?

So let’s look at the definition for this. Microsoft states that an environment is considered to be inactive when it hasn’t been used for 90 days. At that point in time, it is disabled, and the administrator or environment owner is notified. If there is no action taken within the next 30 days, then the developer environment is automatically deleted.

Now, how does Microsoft define ‘Activity’? It goes something like this:

• User activity: Launch an app, execute a flow (whether automatic or not), chat with a Power Virtual Agents bot
• Maker activity: Create, read, update, or delete an app, flow (desktop and cloud flows), Power Virtual Agents bot, custom connector
• Admin activity: Environment operations such as copy, delete, back up, recover, reset

The above is all user driven – ie a user needs to interact with something within the environment. However, it’s also important to note how automation is viewed:

• Activity includes automated behaviors such as scheduled flow runs. For example, if there’s no user, maker, or admin activity in an environment, but it contains a cloud flow that runs daily, then the environment is considered active.

It’s also important to note that at this point in time, the above only applies to Developer environments. Other types of environment (Production, Sandbox etc) don’t have any auto-deletion policies called out for them – well, at least not yet (if something does pop up around these, I’ll definitely look to talk about them too!).

So to answer our question above about what happens with a (developer) environment that is only being used infrequently – the way to stop it being auto-deleted is to put some automation in place. This doesn’t need to be lightweight – it can be something simple & easy, just to ensure that the environment registers activity happening within it.

In my view, it would be nice to have some granularity & control over this as well – allowing organisations to set their own deletion policies. We have this in place for things like audit log retention – it would be nice to have have it in here too.