We are excited to announce the availability of self-service deployment for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations cloud environments. While most changes will be transparent to you, in the coming weeks you will see some changes in the Lifecycle Services (LCS) experience for new customers. For now, the experience for existing customers will remain unchanged. Please note that the functionality noted in this topic will be made available to users based on the geographic location recognized by Microsoft Azure.
What’s new or changed
Customers with the self-service capabilities will see the following changes in their LCS experience.
- Deployment is self-service and can be completed within an average time of 30 minutes. There are no longer lead times and wait times for deployment. You can control when you deploy and verify that the environment is deployed. This experience is the same as the current experience.
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- You will no longer have Remote desktop access to the Tier 2+ Sandbox environments. All operations that need Remote desktop access are now available as self-service actions. The following image shows some of the operations in the environment’s Maintain > Move database menu option.
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- The diagnostics capabilities will remain the same, which enables troubleshooting without remote desktop access.
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- You will be able to deploy Tier 2 Standard Acceptance Test environment (Sandbox) only after you complete project configuration. To complete project configuration and unblock deployment of the Sandbox environment, check the notification in the Action Center on the Project Dashboard page.
- You will not have SQL Server access on Tier 2+. You will continue to have SQL database access using just-in-time access.
- You will need to provide a combined deployable package for customizations. Delta packages will not be supported. This was always a recommended best practice and is now enforced.
Additional resources
Please see the Self-Service Deployment topic for more information.