Is Power Platform stable for real development, what is Your Opinion?

[3ation]

We have been developing for over 18 months, with PowerApps, Flow, PowerBI, and SQL as the back end.

I have 32 years experience in the SDLC and 15 of these years, I was at Microsoft in Redmond SQL and .Net

I am not sure I could say, This platform is ready for development, We have hit so many issues, where the Platform broke us, and we ended up with a long time to recover, or wait for a fix.  With Support very helpful, but there is no way to get fast responses, or accelerated support when the platform is broken. 

Today with the AAD Outage, From 3 days ago, and we are still broken!. Our flows have never recovered, We have now to re name all our flows, and republish all our apps, just to by pass this.   So we are likely to waste few days. 

Recently, the PowerBI had major issues and left us without reporting for the user, We have had so many issues with authoring tools,

We also had few issues, which Microsoft fixed, but that took over a month to fix. 

We have had around 20 support tickets with MS... And it is frustrating to wait for someone to call to fix, or wait for the Fix.... we had to work around many of the issues ourselves. 

I know it is a new platform, but It does not seem that Microsoft is tacking it seriously, so I was wondering, what is your experience, would you develop the next solution using this platform, or are you looking at alternatives? If So, Which ?

[RandyHayes]

@3ation 

Since you're looking for some 2 cents...here is mine.

First, I don't consider the platform as a development platform.  There is really nothing that is developed.  Everything is formula based and so as we work with it, it is considered no different than putting together Excel spreadsheets, but with SO much more.  I only say that because there is not a great sense of SDLC in the platform.  There is minimal at best.  But I never really expected such when we were designing anything of significance in Excel.  

Personally my background is development and with over 15+ years in the ASP.NET space (and MVP for over 10).  Moving to PowerApps was a challenge at first as I was so connected with the developer concept.  Once I let that go from my mind and realized that this is just Excel with a ton more ability, everything fell into place and producing apps was a snap.  In my business space, this was a godsend as it now offered us the ability to focus on business process improvement without the backend training and interaction that was so challenging to get clients to embrace.  Putting an "easy button" in their hand was the answer and the Power Platform brought that to reality.

We've put together hundreds of apps that are in production at this point over the past 4 years.  From basic to highly complex logic.  They all work without any significant interaction from us.  Most go-backs are just about clients wanting more features.

Have there been hiccups? Absolutely.  When there is an issue in the infrastructure (i.e. the AAD issue the other day) things come to a halt.  However, there are always issues...internet outages, power outages, etc.  So I see those issue from the Microsoft cloud as no different.  If they happened on a regular basis, I would have some concern, but they are relatively rare.

I am not sure what problems you all are experiencing in regard to your apps and flows, but we've never seen or experienced anything like that.  And again, out of the hundreds of app over the years, we've never had to open a support incident or found anything that could not be easily corrected or worked around.  But I only state that to share our experience in that regard.

I believe that Microsoft is investing a tremendous amount of effort into this platform.  Over the past 4 years I have seen incredible improvements and changes.  There are still a LOT of known issues and they continue to exist even after so many years - however, we've seen that most have some form of workaround, so they obviously don't rank on the list of fixes vs improvements list.

So as for next app, it PowerApps and the rest of the platform all the way.  From our business model, we are focused on the Office 365 ecosystem and the platform fits perfectly in that as well as being able to access outside of it.  Based on the price point of it, it is a hit for us and out clients.

That decision does not come in a vacuum.  We have researched other alternatives out there and so far, there are none that provide the flexibility and price point that matches what is available in the platform.  

So, that is my 2 cents on your statements.  I hope that it is somewhat helpful for you.