Your own Power Platform playground! How to build it?

As a PowerAddict, it’s great to have your own playground with almost no limits. Learn and experiment with the possibilities of the Power Platform on your own Microsoft 365 tenant without any cost. I also have one like this, and I would like to share how to make one in this short blog.

What do we need?

• Microsoft 365 Developer Program 
  • This is designed to give you and cross-platform productivity experience and includes:
    • Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint.
    • SharePoint
    • Microsoft Teams 
    • Microsoft Graph
  • What’s included? Check this
  • Join the Microsoft 365 developer plan
  • When the program has been created and you have logged in with a user account. We can continue with activating the Power Platform developer plan. 
• Power Platform Developer Plan
  • A development environment to develop and test Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse. Using premium and custom connectors and different developer environments. (at the writing of this blog, the different developer environments were not yet available and coming soon) 
  • Connecting to 400+ data sources out of the box connectors and creating own connectors. 
  • Setup your Power Platform developer plan.
• Microsoft Azure Free Account
  • include 25+ always free Azure services (More information)
    • Azure Cosmos DB
    • Azure App Service
    • Azure Functions
    • Azure Event Grid
    • Azure Kubernetes Service
    • Azure Logic Apps
    • Azure Cognitive Search
    • Azure Service Fabric
    • Azure DevOps
    • Azure Advisor
    • Azure Data Factory
    • DevTest Labs
    • Azure Notification Hubs
    • Azure Batch
    • Azure Automations
    • Azure Data Catalog
    • Virtual Network of Azure
    • Inter VNET
    • 5GB of network bandwidth
    • Visual Studio Code
    • Machine Learning
    • SQL server Developer Edition
  • Fusion teams scenarios can be tested.

Some images:

Round-up

Creating your playground is very easy and without any cost. The Microsoft 365 developer plan is renewed every time Microsoft detects activity. So no worries that you will lose the Microsoft 365 tenant. Within the Power Platform Developer plan, you can go wild with creating canvas or model app, and Power Automated flows. When including AI builder or Power Virtual Agents, you can activate a trial that is limited in time. That’s the only downside I see. If you use Azure resources to automate your test, it could be that you need to pay for those resources. But you can use more than 25 Azure resources that are always free with certain limitations.

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