Architecture

Decisions in this chapter are made once per project, early, and everything else in this guideline builds on top of them.

• Solution Architecture — how solutions are layered and organized.
• Publisher & Prefix — choosing a publisher and customization prefix.
• Environment Strategy — how many environments, and what each is for.
• Deployment Approach — Power Platform Pipelines vs. Azure DevOps/GitHub Actions vs. hybrid.
• Solution Concept (Carrier/Workbench) — our separated-customizing model, documented elsewhere and referenced here for completeness.

Two checkpoints worth doing at project start

• Licensing & entitlements. Verify early that the planned design is covered by the customer's licenses: entitlement limits (API requests per day, per license) are separate from the runtime service protection limits; server-to-server application users don't consume a user license but draw from pooled capacity; Managed Environments are an entitlement of standalone/Dynamics 365 licenses and are not included in the Developer plan. Discovering a licensing gap during UAT is a commercial problem, not a technical one.
• Power Platform Well-Architected assessment. Consider running Microsoft's Well-Architected assessment for the workload at project start and feeding the findings into the backlog — it's the fastest structured way to surface reliability, security, and operations topics the customer hasn't thought about yet.