Environment Strategy

July 17, 2024

Environments: A key concept for Power Platform, Seattle, and the planet

When you first start with Power Platform, you're put in a default environment which ends up littered with all your early experiments, training examples, and workshops.

Next, you'll discover the free Power Apps Developer Plan. Although not meant for production use, you can build complete solutions in developer environments using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse.

To deploy for customers, purchasing Power Apps Premium enables Sandbox and Production environments. With those, you can build a pipeline that moves your solutions from one environment to the next, as follows:

• Dev: Start in your Development environment with unmanaged solutions. That means you're free to make as many changes as you like to any component.

• Test: Send your solutions into a Sandbox environment as managed solutions, mostly locked down with a few configurable exceptions. The idea is that you want testers, not tinkerers. If you need to fix something, do it in Dev.

• Prod: Once you're satisfied with the quality of your managed solution in the test environment, move it to a Production environment.

That's the big picture. There are many other possibilities, and here's a Microsoft whitepaper on the topic of environment strategy.

But when it comes to the physical, chemical, biological world, there's no such thing as a multiplicity of environments. As far as I know, you can't spin up a new environment, or reset an environment to its initial state with the press of a button.

Nor am I taken in by delusions of interplanetary grandeur. I choose to believe what climate scientists are telling us, and I fully support policymakers willing to respond with the necessary urgency. We're all living in the same environment, in the same tenant, with the same shared capacity constraints.

Lately, I've been studying for the PL-200 Power Platform Functional Consultant Associate certification, which is why I have environments on the brain. And that's why I can't help but wonder:

What if we consciously applied Dev-Test-Prod on a (slightly) smaller scale than the environment?

Suppose we classified cities as Dev, Test, and Prod. Some cities experiment with new models, others test those models rigorously and empirically, and the rest benefit through rapid adoption of successful models.

For decades, Seattle has been the "Dev" environment for software, e-commerce, air travel, and coffee. I'd like to see us become equally well known for solving big and challenging problems such as housing, drug treatment, mental health, and climate adaptation.

To change the status quo, we need a combination of open experimentation with rapid expansion of successful models.

Welcome to Convention City Seattle -- the perfect place to envision, model, and build the future.

Bloomberg Green Festival

Last week I attended the very first Bloomberg Green Festival in Seattle, featuring panelists, outdoor entertainment, and a film festival. (To catch the vibe, check out the 2-minute wrap-up video.)

Here are a few takeaways:

• Antarctica's "Doomsday Glacier" is on the verge of collapsing into the sea, which could raise sea levels by more than 2 feet. Or by ten feet if the rest of the ice sheet follows. (Watch: Emelie Mahdavian on her film Planet A)

• In 2012, the documentary Chasing Ice showed timelapse film of melting glaciers, owing to the work of James Balog and the Extreme Ice Survey. In the 2024 film Chasing Time, Balog and crew go on a final expedition to pack up his cameras, as we witness the continued retreat of the glaciers.

• Check out the Electrification Incentives calculator from Rewiring America. That's the kind of green that gets people excited to vote.

• If you mash up a fishing rod and a slingshot, you can climb very tall trees. (Watch: Between Earth & Sky on PBS.)

Plus, you never know when you may need to fight Leviathan and Goliath at the same time.