Power Platform Solution Architecture: Considerations for ALM

In this next post focusing on application lifecycle management as part of this wider series on solution architecture for the Power Platform, I’m going to cover a bunch of things to consider as part of your solution architecture to support your ALM strategy.

Recap…

Don’t forget to recap on this previous post if you haven’t already friends! 📖

#1 – Environment strategy

Okay people, so first consideration. ENVIRONMENT STRATEGY! This thing is so important in supporting your ALM strategy. Let’s face it… you’re not moving those components between environments if you don’t know what environments you’re working with! 😉

Develop an environment strategy right at the start of your implementation that you’re going to use and have support your ALM strategy.

Remember there’s a few more things to think about here than just creating environments friends! Don’t forget the settings configuration you might need to do to support various features you’re planning to implement in your solution. All the environments things here people!

#2 – Handling non-solution aware components

So people, there’s some stuff to consider for any components non-solution aware too. What we mean by that is components that we can’t add to a solution in the Power Platform and then move between environments.

Examples of these types of things could be components deployed in Azure, configuration data for Dynamics 365 solutions or your own custom solutions and more. We also have to think about how these non-solution aware components interact with our Power Platform components. Environment variables will be your friends here 🙂

Here’s some food for thought in this area friends…

• Think about using source control for non-solution aware components
• Consider using source control for Power Platform solution components too.
• Consider making your ALM strategy and approach ‘source-control’ centric where you have to support non-solution aware components
• If you do go down this approach you should ideally get to a point where all other environments than production should be able to be deleted and then re-created without experiencing development or configuration data loss (due to source control being the master).

More content on ALM

So friends, having thought about a few things above to consider as part of your solution architecture for ALM elements… check out these posts to continue to learn in this area!