Environment-centric approach
The first approach we would like to introduce is the environment-centric approach, whereby the single source of truth is your development environment.
The basic process is that you export your solution as managed from DEV and deploy it to the downstream environments. This is the approach that is used in most of the current Power Platform projects.
Usually, this means that the focus is on the development environment. It will be nurtured and taken care of. This, in itself, has a positive and negative impact. When the development environment fails and becomes unusable or any wrong change is made that can’t be undone, we might run into problems, since it is the only environment where we can make changes.
The export and deployment could be done manually or automated with pipelines.
The following figure illustrates the approach.
Figure 7.1 – Environment structure and flow for the environment-centric approach...