In today’s article, I will try to explain the different types of Power Platform environment, and the purpose (recommended use) of each type.

As we know, when you start building applications in Power Platform, the first thing you will need to check, is in which environment you are ?

How to create a new environment ?

From your Make PowerPlatform portal (https://make.powerplatform.com) , navigate to the top right setting icon and select “Admin Center”

From the admin centre, you can select “Environments” from the left navigation panel.

As you can see in the screenshot above, you can see two environments.

Create a new environment

To create a new environment, simply, Click the “New” button, which opens a pop up panel on the right side, with the following parameters:

Name: The name of your new environment.

Region: Geographical region where you want your environment to be provisioned.

Type:You have different types of environments, we will describe which type to use and for which purpose.

Purpose:A description of the purpose of your environment.

Add a Dataverse data store ? Whether you want to provision a data verse data base and start building apps

Pay-as-you go with Azure ? If you want to pay for this environment usage via you azure subscription.

Different types of environments?

There are different types of environments you can select for your new environment.

Each type is recommended for a certain type of usage (source)

• Sandbox A sandbox environment is any non-production environment of Dataverse. Isolated from production, a sandbox environment is the place to safely develop and test application changes with low risk. Sandbox environments include capabilities that would be harmful in a production environment, such as reset, delete, and copy operations. More information: Manage sandbox environments
• Production The environment where apps and other software are put into operation for their intended use.
• Developer (formally called Community). The Power Apps Developer Plan gives you access to Power Apps premium functionality, Dataverse, and Power Automate for individual use. This plan is primarily meant to build and test with Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse or for learning purposes. A developer environment is a single-user environment, and can’t be used to run or share production apps.
• Default A single default environment is automatically created for each tenant and shared by all users in that tenant. The tenant identifies the customer, which can have one or more Microsoft subscriptions and services associated with it. Whenever a new user signs up for Power Apps, they’re automatically added to the Maker role of the default environment. The default environment is created in the closest region to the default region of the Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) tenant and is named: “{Azure AD tenant name} (default)”