{"id":109140,"date":"2016-10-24T06:25:31","date_gmt":"2016-10-24T13:25:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/powerapps-environments\/"},"modified":"2025-06-11T08:17:03","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T15:17:03","slug":"powerapps-environments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/powerapps-environments\/","title":{"rendered":"Announcing PowerApps environments"},"content":{"rendered":"

Later this week, we will be introducing a new concept called \u201cenvironments\u201d to PowerApps. Put simply, an environment is a space to store, manage, and share your organization\u2019s business data, apps, and flows. They also serve as containers to separate apps that may have different roles, security requirements, or target audiences. How you choose to leverage environments depends on your organization and the apps you are trying to build, for example:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. You may choose to only build your apps in a single environment.<\/li>\n
  2. You might create separate environments that group the Test and Production versions of your apps.<\/li>\n
  3. You might create separate environments that correspond to specific teams or departments in your company, each containing the relevant data and apps for each audience.<\/li>\n
  4. You might also create separate environments for different global branches of your company.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Environment scope<\/h1>\n

    Each environment is created under an Azure AD tenant and its resources can only be accessed by users within that tenant.\u00a0 An environment is also bound to a geographic location, like the US. When you create a app in an environment, that app is routed to only datacenters in that geographic location.\u00a0 Any items you create in that environment, including connections, gateways, flows using Microsoft Flow, and more, are also bound to their environment\u2019s location.<\/p>\n

    Every environment can have zero or one Common Data Service databases, which provides storage for your apps. The ability to create a database for your environment will depend on the license you purchase for PowerApps and your permission within that environment.<\/p>\n

    When you create an app in an environment, that app is only permitted to connect to the data sources that are also deployed in that same environment, including connections, gateways, flows, and Common Data Service databases.\u00a0 For example, let\u2019s consider a scenario where you have created two environments named \u2018Test\u2019 and \u2018Dev\u2019 and created a Common Data Service database in each of the environments. If you create an app in the \u2018Test\u2019 environment, it will only be permitted to connect to the \u2018Test\u2019 database, it will not be able to connect to the \u2018Dev\u2019 database.<\/p>\n

    \"Environments\"<\/a><\/p>\n

    Environment permissions<\/h1>\n

    Environments have two built-in roles that provide access to permissions within an environment:<\/p>\n