Unmanaged solutions in PROD environment

[grantreid]

Looking to get some thoughts on the concept of should a PROD environment only ever have managed solutions? 
Is there reasonable grounds to have an unmanaged solution deployed to such an environment? 

Using SharePoint as a data source could be an excuse, but shifting between a test and prod SP list can be overcome with environment variables. 

Thoughts suggestions?  Links to any doco?

[HSheild · Accepted solution]

Hi @grantreid 

Managed vs unmanaged solutions is a debate that has been going on for years, and people can have very strong views either way. A few years back, there were limitations with managed solutions which made people prefer unmanaged in a prod environment (including myself). But I believe all of the major limitations have now been fixed. I’ve been using managed solutions with my clients for the past 3 years now and have not run into any issues. Personally I always recommend managed solutions for non-Dev environments. 

It is also Microsoft’s recommended approach which you can read about here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/alm/solution-concepts-alm

[grantreid]

Thanks for the reply.   Yeah, I've read that page. Sometimes what Microsoft proposes versus reality are two different things 🙂  So thought I'd check what people are actually doing. 

[eleung83]

To add fire to the mix, MS themselves were, upto the middle of last year, still using unmanaged solutions in their own production environments

One thing I would recommend when going down the managed route is to spend some time how you want to structure your solutions, as this can have a bearing if you have multiple teams updating the same components using different solutions/publishers etc

Otherwise you may regularly come across weird issues with solution layering or solution imports not overwriting components in your target environment when you were expecting them to

[albatros]

I'm new to Power apps. I'm still trying to understand the concept of managed vs unmanaged solutions

My app is simple and I know that I will have to make changes to dataverse tables and the app itself.

My biggest fear is to lose data, as I have a database with 10000+ record with data since 2021.

I cannot find in the documentation what is the behavior of simple actions like removing of renaming a column in dataverse after exporting and reimporting a solution as managed.. the inner of power apps is still very obscure.