Development Environment Setup

[brandimore]

Hi There - We are want to commission a Power Platform DEV environment. We have completed the trials and now we are confident we want to move forward with Power Platform.

The issue is that this DEV environment needs to be separate from Prod. Another team has a Power Platform environment in Prod and the concern is that if we are in the same 'area' as them, we might inherit some of their permissions and have access we shouldn't. 

There's a bit of confusion in the best way to set this up. Can anyone provide documentation or experience on this please? My understanding is that we need an Azure Subscription as well to make this a proper DEV environment to connect to an on Prem Sql Server.

Thank you!

My thoughts on this were to:

[joe_hannes_col]

Hello @brandimore,

If you are creating environments within the same tenants, you can specify access to these environments on a per-environment level.

For example, you can limit access to your development environment to a certain group of users, and access to your peers' prod environment to another group of users.

Here's more documentation on environments in the Power Platform: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/environments-overview

And no, you will not need an Azure Subscription to connect to an On Premises SQL server. Here are instructions on how to connect to an On Premises SQL server: https://powerapps.microsoft.com/de-at/blog/connect-to-your-on-premises-data-sources-using-on-premise...

[brandimore]

Thank you for the detailed response! One more quick question if you don't mind. We have a production environment and we don't have our own site yet. I see the DEFAULT site that comes with Power Platform. Someone mentioned that it's not best practise to create apps, tables etc in this one, you should have a separate site. Is this accurate and if so, can you share some details or a link about why. I'd like to bring this up to my senior management. 

[joe_hannes_col · Accepted solution]

Hello @brandimore, this is correct. In the default environments, all licensed users in your organization have the Environment Maker role, which gives them a lot of freedom to create new apps, flows, etc. - things you do not want going on in an environment where you have business critical apps or sensitive data.

Here's more information on the default environment: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/guidance/adoption/secure-default-environment

[bestremoteteam]

@brandimore thanks for the sharing knowledge.