Hi and welcome to Dynamics Update. Today is a very special episode because we are not at home and we are not in the studio and we are not with the podcast portal on remote. We we are actually in Slovenia at Dynamics Minds. So with me of course I have Gustav as usual. Hello Ivan, how are you?I'm fine, thank you. And you?I'm great. I'm great. We are in, we are in a studio of sorts, right?In our podcast
recording room. Yes, exactly. But we have a very special guest today, someone that I've been chasing down for like 1 1/2 years or so. And finally we locked him in the room here at Dynamics Mind. So could you please introduce yourself?Sure. Hi everyone. My name is Lane Swinka and I'm a principal program manager at Microsoft, focusing on all of the unified experiences for both administration as well as developers. Effectively trying to move LCS workloads into Power Platform.
So, yeah. So, so that's the actual subject for today, understanding what will happen once LCS goes away. So that's that's the question on everyone's mind right now. Yes. When is LCS going away? Yeah. And and and especially what will happen afterwards and how will we do it? How will we live without LCS?Yes. There is a way. There is a way. Yeah.
Have no fear. Yeah. YeahSo, so if we start with the with the new development environments and and unified environments, so we are moving things into Power Platform admin center, which basically means that all of the administration is done from there, right?Yes, that's correct. And then the big like mental shift with all of this is trying to reconsider FNO for being an environment which it certainly is an LCS today. So every time you create a sandbox or a production environment. That is 1 to
one with an instance of FNO. It's just what we've been used to. But in the Power Platform admin center, an environment is more of a larger scope. It has kind of that one to many model. You can have different Dynamics apps, multiple power apps and flows, co-pilots, copilot, copilot. We have to mention it at least once. Yeah, that's right. Multiple times. Yeah. You can have all of those stored in
one environment powered by Dataverse. And that's really where we want to move FNO to is is to be that Dynamics FNO app hosted by Dataverse. In one unified environment. So yeah, that's really cool. I use the PowerShell script to spin up new environments as late as yesterday because I used it for a demo purpose and it's like a backup and it's very simple and it's kind of takes away. You have to remember it's a lot of
complexity in those little things. I run one script and I get one FNO environment, a dataverse environment, I get copilot and it's pretty fast as well. And I forgot to mention in my presentation that this is like super complicated stuff really, but just with the flick of a switch. Just spins up with Contoso data of course, but you can use your own data
set later on I would imagine exactly. I think that's one of the other things I want to highlight with Power Platform is just the rich ecosystem we have of tools, APIs. That was something that LCS has always kind of lacked. There was a great community set of tools that has filled a very large gap there for for many years,
but within Power Platform we have. Power Platform CLI, which is primarily used by developers for like Dataverse and solution management, but it also has environment creation and kind of environment crud. We also have a PowerShell module for administrators and now we have connectors as well. So you can even create logic apps and flows to manage your environment fleet effectively. That's actually one of my favorite parts of this is that we actually get an API where we can
actually do things. In an automated fashion, because LCS hasn't really been very good at automating things. We were very happy when we finally got to be able to deploy packages automatically from Azure DevOps. Yes, but. But not to production, right. But then it sort of stopped. It never got got any more fun than that. So yes, and service principles, right, like the whole multi-factor auth thing has been a constant, I think, pain point for customers, right. You know, have to have
an account that's not MFA enabled. You know, you have to sacrifice something to the entree. Yeah, exactly. I'm sorry, I'm here again now. I need an account. Sorry guys. Yes, precisely. So yeah, everything is service principle enabled in Power Platform and not just available, but encouraged. So yeah, yeah, that's good, that's good. And also I know that one of the questions coming up here is
also regarding the different tiers. We have the tier one, the cloud hosted environments, we have the Tier 2 up to five and then we have production because production is. Somewhere in between or something like that. So you talked about this in your session today about the different tiers, which is an interesting part. Yeah. And it's it's all kind of going to the the change first in business model. So F&O actually was using what CRM did many years ago, which
was the slot model. You have environment, whole environment slots and you pay per environment on like a flat monthly fee. I think for Dataverse or the earlier versions of CRM, it was around like $500 a month for a sandbox. And with FNO, as you mentioned, we've had these different tiers and you can when you buy your licenses for FNO today in LCS, you get a sandbox and you get a production environment and that's it. And if you want more environments, that's a
monthly purchase. Customers can put them on their enterprise agreement, but those go all the way up to I think $12,000 US a month for the top tier. And one thing that we've seen a lot of times is customers will buy one of these higher tier performance environments for data migration, perf testing and so forth. But then when they go live, their production environment is using the subscription estimator, which is their actual
anticipated workload, right. So production could be much smaller and less performant than one of their sandboxes. And that's always kind of a hard conversation to have is. How could that be so?And they're really just separate purchases. Production is based on your licenses and usage and Sandbox was just
this one off thing that you bought. So in Power Platform, all of the environments with Dataverse, so kind of ignoring F&O for a second, everything is equal for a given customer and it's based on everything based on your licenses. And so every 24 hours we detect how many Power Apps licenses you have, Dynamics and so forth and then that will set the auto scale limit for Dataverse. Now the FNO is being modeled as an app in
Dataverse in Power Platform. That same signal will go first to Dataverse and then if FNO is present, the same signal will go to FNO and say, hey, the customer went from the minimum 20 to 100, you know they upped their license count. And So what that's going to do is then auto scale out all of their sandboxes and their production production sandbox will always be equal. So there shouldn't be any like misrepresentations of what the performance will be when they go live.
Yeah. So there's just a lot of benefits to this model. Yeah, I I always said with the tier environment is that the problem has been that in AX112, the customer were used to throwing money at the problem. When things were too slow, they could always pay for better hardware and get it to go faster. The problem is that there is no go fast SKU in in in F&O today. Yes, it's all up to
the subscription estimator. If you don't have the right circumstances, there is basically you can't throw money at the problem, which means that we end up in a situation where if you have performance issues and you have like you have more transactions than your. Your number of user licenses sort of accounted for accounting for. Yeah, then then you can. If you're lucky, then you can add a support issue and you get. Scaled up a bit and in more cases you will have to buy like
transactional license. Yeah, the order line SKU or if you have under licensed people, that's an easy one. It's like, hey, we have more people logging into the environment than have actually had licenses. F&O never had any like really strict license enforcement. I believe that is changing at some point. I
don't exactly know. It's scary, but it's but yeah, but before you do any kind of enforcement like that, you have to be able to show customers where are they, right, because it's hard to know across a lot of. Environments. And so actually a lot of the Power Platform admin center reporting capabilities will show you, here's all of my licenses, here's all my
users. Is there a delta?Yeah. So yeah, a lot of and some grace periods so you can adjust mainly storage I would imagine is the driver there for FNO environments. Yes, yes, storage is another one. And so yeah, as part of all of this, FNO has moved as I mentioned, like the slot model is what we have today, but we're moving to a storage based model. LCS isn't really being changed to work with storage. It still just knows about
environment slots. If you, you know, are really only supposed to have, let's say, a terabyte of data, and based on all of your environments today in LCS, you're at like 5 terabytes. If you have an open environment slot because you bought it on that monthly basis, you can still just deploy it and get even further in the hole. You know, we have nothing to stop you, right?But in Power Platform, everything looks at your current state of
storage. If you're out of storage or if you're over, then you actually can't deploy anything new. So much more strict storage management and just means we all need to look at those clean up jobs and and but there's more features that are necessary as well. Yeah, you made a point there as well with the one big pain point has been the backpack move and the restore operations down to tier one environment. So you're doing something there with transaction less. I was going to say transnaction
less was the old joke. There is somewhere in the code I think a comment that still says transnaction. Oh, yes, I think most likely. Yeah, it is a transaction. It's like a sounds yummy. No, there's a we also refer to it as advanced copy internally because just naming, you know, naming things for us is difficult. But one of the ways in which customers have proliferated their storage today is by copying production everywhere, right? And when you copy what we call database
refresh in LCS today. It copies the entire database from prod to sandbox and across all the different sandboxes and there was no option to do anything else. And so really we kind of force customers to over consume in some cases and at the ERP system it's. Transactional integrity is is paramount. So you can't just go into the ERP and delete stuff because they're posted. Those items, those release products are permanent at this point because they have
usage. That's just how ERPS work. Whereas like in Dataverse, I can just pop open a table, select star and hit delete, you know, go clear that thing out super easy. So ERP customers haven't had a lot of tools to keep the storage in check. So that's where there's kind of two features that are going to help with this, one that I actually demoed today. Was the transactionless copy. So that actually allows you to copy. The target
is always in Power Platform. You can have a source environment in LCS, target is in PPAC or you know within Power Platform sandbox A to sandbox B and so forth. But it strips out all of the transactions, does a full truncate. We use the metadata on the table in FNO to determine if it's a, you know, transaction header, transaction line, worksheet header, worksheet line. I think there's like 10 different table group properties and then we just truncate them
out. Yeah. And it, you know, as we were building this feature, I was just like, this is gonna be a testing nightmare. And to my surprise, when we we wrote the process, we did our first transaction list copy, opened up FNOI didn't get any error messages. I started clicking around and I created a new sales order because the list page was empty and it picked up the number sequence where the number sequence left off. It let me pick, pack and ship, post that thing, invoice
it like it was literally. I think the reason it works so well is because it was so holistic. Yeah, it deleted every transaction. It didn't just forget some tables in between and leave it data, you know, nightmare on the customer. So yeah, it's a great way to reduce storage. Yeah. And so we're seeing some customers, you know, went from I think 13 or 15 terabytes down to three. So like a 90% reduction I think was the best case we've
seen typically the larger. The source environment, the heavier it has in transactions, so the bigger bang for the buck. So that leads me to a question I need to ask. What's the biggest production environment, the database that you have ever seen?Well, so I will say we have a lot of customers using Hyperscale, which allows you to go over the, I believe it's like 4 or 4 1/2 terabyte limit that Azure SQL has on individual databases. So I will say that goes up to 100 terabytes.
We don't have a customer on 100 terabytes, but yeah, we have significantly higher than 4 1/2 terabytes. So yeah, yeah, that's pretty costly as well looking at the license model. So you need to look into some archiving solutions there I would imagine. And that is the other feature. There is a data archival capability that's being built in F&O and it's gonna leverage Dataverse for long term retention. I actually don't know a ton about that, but I believe that will be
the best way to keep production lean. And so if that's smaller, that also has cascading. Yeah, we had a session with Purvesh from Fastrack earlier to discuss the archiving feature in F&O and it looks very promising. So you just need to set your archiving rules correctly, otherwise accounting departments will. We'll find you like where did my stuff go exactly. But it's also important because I mean we are not used to archiving stuff
even in AX 2012. If you ask the finance department what do you would you like to keep and they say everything of course please and thank you. Yeah. Yeah So so it's it's really important to to I think there is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to get to a point where we can actually start activating
archiving. Because we need to understand what are we legally required to keep and what can we get rid of and and also in the next step how, how, where does the data end up in in in this way it ends up in one lake or in fabric. But understanding how could we consume that data after everything is is exported to somewhere else, right? Yeah, I think. It's a whole,
just again like a mental shift. Whenever we're switching business models or you know, environment management approach, we really have to start training folks to think about their storage because that is where the cost driver is now. So if you don't need to keep the data for compliance reasons or regulatory reasons and so forth and you don't need it for operational reasons, it's a good idea to try and shrink that, you know, archive it or truncate it, that's the case maybe.
There's a lot of clean up jobs running right now. I think one of the main things I notice nowadays is that you get a lot of notifications like this job is not running, run this job and it's very informative. I think Microsoft sees us as children running around. So you need to kind of like OK and enforce this job please and then it's enforced. But it's really good because like retail, you have payment transactions, they take up a lot of space and it's for no reason if it's
like older than 90 days. So yeah, right, that's a very good clean up job that you can the the team that I'm on, I actually. Have my whole histories in F&O and Dynamics AX, but I actually am in the Power Apps team now and the team that I'm on actually just released this feature called Environment Groups. It's brand new. It just went GA in Power Platform Admin Center and it's a way to take a bunch of environments that you want to govern in the same way and put them in a
group. And once they're in the group, there's another tab on that called Rules and that's where you can set up different like policies. That apply to all those environments and then you can't manage those environments individually for those things anymore. So great thing for like environment settings, backup retention. There's a lot of things in there for low code management as well. There's nothing in there for FNO yet, but as you can imagine, I'm going to be pushing some FNO
stuff there. It would be nice to be able to set up like the clean up jobs, data hygiene for it. Like here, here's how I want these things to run. I want all of my sandboxes to have these things applied, all my production environments that behave like this cause they need a little bit longer and exactly. So try and make that easier. Yeah, that's really, really cool. Another question that always comes up when it comes to LCS, some of the usage of the LCS
analysis tools, right?Telemetry. So I've already activated this on most environments using the application insights and it's really. I mean you can get stuck down the rabbit hole just looking at all that data. It's like oh what are they doing my my users. But yeah, but it's also coming with like CPU and actual DTU that the the the tools that we had or have still have in LCS will be pushed to Application Insights I guess. Yeah, the goal is to get to parity
with what we have in LCS. So most notably we haven't had like some of the dead locking stuff from SQL and some of the AOS properties. So how the App Insights feature?I actually helped build that as well. I have my fingers in a lot of different things apparently. But the App Insights feature was built on the FNO runtime and
it's near real time. So within a few seconds any telemetry or anything that's happening inside of FNO as it's running gets sent to App Insights where LCS had some extra features that is not in that feature today. In App Insights are things that are happening outside of FNO like at the database layer. So if the database has a crash or the AOS has a crash, the AOS cannot send telemetry, right?And so you know it's so by design those things were not
there. So we're building some kind of supporting services that will be monitoring and sending to the same App Insights instance for some of those external things like CPU, RAM, AOS like overload, throttling, exactly so. So yeah, as soon as we have those, then we'll be looking to deprecate kind of the LCS environment monitoring stuff in favor of that. That makes sense. But it's also good to have it in the same in the same
Application Insights instance. Because then you will be able to correlate different things that happens within FNO and outside of FNO into one timeline. Yes, precisely. This is really important and actually one other unique scenario there is with unified environments. So this works with unified environments as well. The environment ID that you use that you normally grab from LCS, you just grab the Power Platform environment ID, snap it into FNO and then it knows how to send the events.
But you can also set that same thing up for Dataverse and point it to the same app insights instance. So then you can start to see that end to end across the whole unified. I did the same for commerce as well, but commerce is very chatty. So I think I saw the usage like boom just went up. So I had to turn it off because I couldn't like see anything useful in it yet. But I need to push that to a different insights I think to get
some traction there. Yeah, I think that team is looking to provide similar mechanisms where like when you're setting up app insights in FNO. You can choose what do I want to capture. It's not just whole thing is on or whole thing is off. And I think that's where commerce is going as well. We've actually seen quite a lot of uptake by the supply chain and warehousing team too. So yeah, you're just going to see more and more events
and telemetry. But again, each one of those should have a switch and you choose when you want to turn it on and and and that's also a new expertise that needs to be for for FNO people is to understand the customer and understand how to filter and and Maintain storage in in Application Insights as well. Yes, with the Log Analytics workspaces. And yeah, they have to set up and configure rules to storage, right?Yeah, back to the storage topic.
Yes. And it shouldn't be a big problem when you think about logs, but it rapidly becomes a problem when you turn on CSU and you have a lot of different platforms. Fortunately, it already has an archiving feature. So we're already home. Yes. Yeah, they they absolutely do. And they have different retention settings, I
think by. By telemetry type. So if it's like page views, you can say I only need like 7 days of that information, but I need 90 days of something else or yeah, it's totally configurable. So yeah, lots of lots of good things. One thing that we did cover in the session today that was kind of cool to see was the timeline for LCS deprecation. So we've never actually shared that publicly, but now we've kind of come out with the the formal timeline.
And so for I guess all the the viewers or the listeners, the the end goal is to have LCS decommissioned by the end of 2025. And so really where we need to get to is the new unified developer experience getting GA which is imminent. I think it's a couple of weeks from now. Along with that that's prompted us to get the admin experiences going cause you have to have some administration of the developer environments, but then we'll also need to
build support for sandbox and prod. Once that's all GA roughly in October of this year, then that starts kind of our deprecation path like at least 12 ish, 12 to 15 months of kind of LCS tear down. So and like practically it's gonna be similar to moving from Gos and LCS, right?You order like moving it from. Yes. Yeah, we are looking to make
it self-service. And so we are actually looking to leverage that project migration manager that we have where customers can move from the United States instance of LCS to the like local EU or France. There'll just be a new option there for Power Platform Admin Center and there will only be one Power Platform Admin Center. There's not like multiple instances of of PPAC, there's just one.
Because again, there's no real storage in Power Platform admin center like LCS has an asset library and you upload things there. You don't do any of that in P pack. So they only have just like a thin client and it's just like a web, a website, traditional one. There's no database or any backing data store for P pack. Everything is stored inside of individual Dataverse environments. And so that's, you know, obviously Geo bound to
wherever Dataverse was deployed. So yeah, just again, a different, different paradigm, but. Yeah. So with all of those timelines, we're looking to route new customers towards the end of this year, like in the fall. So as a brand new customer comes to the LCS front door, cause we know there's still gonna be documentation out there for LCS, there's gonna be partners. They're like the first thing you do is you go to LCS to get environments going, right?Like it's just
like a it's a habit. And so there there will be a effectively like a survey. That says, are you using any of the features that we don't have ready yet, like commerce or AX 2012 upgrade?And if they say no, I'm not using any of those, then we'll route them over to Power Platform, have like a YouTube video that will play, kind of introduce them, right?Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then, yeah, then off they go
and can start deploying things there. And eventually there won't be a questions right as we solve one of those components that it will just be, yeah, everybody routes. So yeah, so I don't know if you can talk about this, but I I noticed two things. So first of all, the AX2012 migration tools, database and and code migration that are in LCS today. I don't know if you can talk about what will happen to those.
Yeah, so the plan with, yeah, as you can imagine, every aspect of LCS is either going to be just straight up deprecated. It has no future. And in a lot of cases those are happening to things that are just low utilization, no utilization, or they have a new way of doing it. Like the asset library is integral to LCS. It's not even necessary in Power Platform. So like you can just, you don't have to upload your code anywhere first, you just send it straight to Dataverse.
So you build your code in Azure DevOps, stream your code into Dataverse. And then there's things like the the code upgrade tools, some of the upgrade reports that we have in in LCS as well. All of those are gonna be moved to like a a toolkit and they'll just be hosted on GitHub and you can run it on Prem because you have your A X 2012 stuff on Prem
anyway. So you can analyse your code, get like the output into Excel to see like what are all the things that I need to go turn into extensions and then also any of the like datas. Kind of cleaning reporting when it comes out. Yeah. And I think Fast Track's gonna take most of that. So they'll be working with partners and with customers and it'll just be basically a the on premise tool. Yeah. Yep. You also said the magic word on Prem, so local business data.
Yes, yesSo that was kind of a funny one, the customers of LBD or local business data or F&O on Prem. Have always kind of found it painful to use LCS. They have to upload things to the cloud just to come back to manage and orchestrate their on Prem like workload. And if LCS has any any kind of an outage that gives them an outage. And one of the benefits of being on their own infrastructure, their own data centers was resiliency, right, like in full
control. So what we're looking to do with on Prem is actually let it be fully on Prem, no cloud control plane and so. To that end, I think what we're going to do is follow the dataverse model, which is they have a CRM on Prem and they have a management PowerShell module that lets you provision new instances, run rolling updates and so forth. We'll basically have a Microsoft supported on premise module for FNO as well, so. Very cool. Yes. So you have a lot of stuff to do and you have until end of
2025. So yes, yeah, the the countdown will be ticking here soon. You know, we just have to make sure that we can't start deprecating things until we have the GA replacement and you know, so we're all very focused on getting the unified experiences for admins and developers fully GA. And then as soon as that happens, then the dominoes start falling. So very cool. Yeah, we're excited. Yeah. And the unified dev environments are available today. So
everyone can test them. Yep, YepAnd the the admin experience is in preview, right?Yeah, they're kind of, you know, paired at the hip. You know, as these developer environments, you have to have a provisioning experience, you have to have an update experience, right, for taking FNO updates and quality updates. So really the even though we were really focused on getting the developer experience GA, it brought forward a bunch
of our admin experiences with it. So there won't be a ton of extra things we have to do for the unified admin experience to get GA. It's mostly just production environment support and like I said the auto scale for the lack of tiers, right, like all environments will have one set of sizing. And so that's those are the two primary features that we're working on. Yes. And you also mentioned today that the trial experience is also available. Yes, yeah,
all apps now have trials. So Commerce has a trial finance supply chain. And one thing we touched on as well is all of these different licenses like we sell licenses by brand now, but they're all going to include the same FNO app. So you have an environment with Dataverse with the FNO app, but based on which license you bought, even if you bought the quote UN quote free one because it was a trial. There may be additional things that we install by default.
So you know, copilot for finance for a finance license, copilot for SCM for SCM license and so forth. And commerce is gonna have the the scale unit solutions installed. But there's nothing to say that you as a supply chain customer, you couldn't go install copilot for finance. You could so, but it's just mostly an efficiency thing. Yeah, exactly. Yep. Yeah. And also you mentioned commerce. How will you handle the e-commerce part because that's an external
application today. Yeah. So in LCS commerce has a couple of like hyperlinks on their environments and it takes you out to like another portal where you manage some of the, you know, how many scale units do I want to deploy or the e-commerce portal as well. So all of those are going to be deployed as dataverse solutions on the FNO environment. So again, it's the same FNO app that's present there like the others.
But those solutions, once they're installed, they're going to bring in some additional UI into P pack where you can manage how many, like you know, I can go from zero to one to two or however I want to deploy. And so yeah, that is some of the work that that team is working on. But it's very similar to the FNO app today. When you install it or you want to update it, it brings you to another page where you can see some kind of advanced things because. Most apps on Dataverse
and Power Platform have one version. It's just whatever's the latest, right?The latest and greatest. You want to install it today, you get version one, you want to install it tomorrow, you get version 1.5 because they release something overnight, right?FNO customers typically like to snap to certain releases and have like more control. So we again have built, we actually we built this for FNO, but all Dynamics first party teams can
use that capability. So that's kind of the spirit of 1 Dynamics, one platform is. Whenever we found something super unique for FNO that wasn't already there, we tried to build it in such a way that all teams can benefit from it and have like that consistency. But again, if there was already features like environment, you know, a creation, deletion, copy, backup, restore, those were already there for dataverse. We didn't build a new one for FNO, we just plugged it into what was there. So
makes sense. Very cool. So. I don't have anything else. I mean, we're very thankful for you being here. Oh, this was great. Yeah. YeahIn the studio here live from Slovenia. Yeah. YeahThis is really, really great. So thank you guys for having me. Thank you for coming. Thank you for coming. My pleasure. All right.