Power Apps Environments Explained

Power Apps environments are containers that administrators can use to manage apps, flows, connections, and other assets, as well as user permissions to use Power Platform resources.

This video covers the core concepts of environments, different types of environments (including the default environment and why you can't delete it, how to create a new environment, and how environments work in Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents as well as Power Apps.

00:00 What are environments
01:36 Default environment
03:19 Rename an environment
05:10 Assets and solutions in environments
07:34 Create a new environment
07:53 Types of environments
09:27 Environments in Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents
10:39 Capacity
11:22 Get subscribed

[marcosmanto]

Thanks for your videos. Could you make a video explaining the process of migrating an app from development to production. How the data sources are related between environments. What type of powerapps license is necessary to have environments with dev and production feature. All this is very confusing to me. Again thanks for your excellent channel

[zazayaung]

That clarifies a lot my doubts with regards to how the multiple environments work. Thanks so much for your time and effort!

[shannonpmo]

Thankyou, that was brilliant. Very clear and easy to understand.

[chrisyleenz]

Thank you, so many things are unclear when I just trying to figure out things by myself

[assistdarrenlutchner]

Another great video Lisa. I just finished a Student Database development where I built a Solution in a Development Environment. the Development included a Model Driven App, an embedded Canvas app and a Power Automate Flow (from the Canvas App).
Once developed I exported the solution to a Sandbox Envornment on the customers Tenanant. Once they gave the Ok migrated to the customer Production Environment.

In theory all should work however everytime I imported the solution I had to rebuild the connectors and in some cases rebuild parts of the flow. Very frustrating but learnt alot.

I would love it if you could do a video showing how you would build and migrate solutions across tenants.

[KellyVerhaeghe]

Hey Lisa, any idea why the default environment does not have backups enabled? I see that new created environments have the backups, but the default not, how do we enable backups on the default one?

[sarahrubenstein]

Thanks for the video! I have a question: I am using both Power app and Power automate through my school's Microsoft account. However, in Power app the default environment is called: "School District of [my town name] (default)", and in Power automate it is called "Default Environment". I cannot connect Power automate flows to Power app because if this. Why are the default environments named differently?

[johningram]

Your videos are great, and I trust you. You mentioned the Power Platform COE Starter Kit, so I immediately looked into it. Getting it set up looks like a beast, but I'm willing to go through it, if it will help me. Are you interested in doing a video walkthrough of the COE Starter Kit itself? Not how to set it up, but what it is and why it's useful?

[mirrrvelll]

Hey Lisa! Great video! But, I got some question, you mentioned Region/Geo part and if I understood it clearly, you can create more and you can change region without any interferring - so that means I can also different Env in Power BI dataflows and so on?

[luca-rwss]

Very useful Lisa. Did you release some video for a way of working with these envs? I mean how to efficiently promote code from dev to test to UAT without manually export and import. Thank you

[CesarGarcia-zk]

Thank you for this video, Lisa. I have been looking for an explanation in regard to geo restrictions, and unless I was mistaken, you mentioned that you can have a multi-geo environment for one tenant? So if the tenant was US based, I should be able to work and share apps with users in say, Canada if they were added to the same environment?

[mikesmith]

I confirm that 'stuff' is indeed a technical term but not the one in common use in our office !

[josvondar]

Thanks Lisa for all the awesome videos on model driven apps and dataverse.
I have a question regarding licensing, say I want to have 3 env (dev, uat, prod), do I need 3 separate licenses or only one is enough ?

[martinargimon]

Hi lisa. I work as a freelance consultant for two different companies. One is my own company and the other is an 'external' company. In my own company i hve been able to create "lIsts' and flows' ( under my own default) enviromnment. How do i create a flow and save it in the external company ? ( I suppose this is another tenant and as suche i need to be given permission to create a flow and save it under that specific Tenancy ?. They have added me as a 'User' under the MS 365 license, but do they also need to add me as a user in their own sepcific environment ? Or can i cretae a flow in my own comany's environmen and then use it in this other tenant ? thahking you in advance.

[mirrrvelll]

..and another question, according to your experience is it a good practice of having more Environments?

[timbell]

Thanks for this really helpful video! I do have one question: the Microsoft materials also mention instances, but this isn't included in later guidance - is "instance" the old name for "environment"?

[gheester]

Another great video. I have inherited PP and notice I have hundreds of these Microsoft Teams environments. What are theses and how do I stop or slow the mass provisioning of them?

[tonjewaasj]

Great video. I created myself a sandbox environment, but why can I only see it from Power Automate, and not from Power Apps?

[MountainMalicks]

Very informative! Just getting started. Didn't realize the default env had so few controls/restrictions on it such that all users are makers for example. Regarding sandboxes, the MS docs state: "A sandbox environment is any non-production environment of Microsoft Dataverse. Isolated from production, a sandbox environment is the place to safely develop and test application changes with low risk". So does that mean all your Thrive HR - Dev/Test/UAT environments are sandbox envs?

[bl]

Having only ms 365 e5 plan in the organization can we create environment?