Early release cycle environments

Product engineering teams update online software continuously. Updates that include fixes and minor or major features and capabilities may be made daily and weekly. It may take the update days or weeks to rollout to all customer environments in all regions.

Early release cycle gives you the ability to create environments that are updated first. This allows you to experience and validate scenarios that are important to you before any updates reach your business-critical applications.

Early release cycle environments are also the environments that are used for Power Apps preview program.

Create early release cycle environments

Early release cycle environments are created similarly to the way other environments are created in the Power platform admin center.

In fact, the only difference is in which infrastructure the environment is created, and therefore, it gets software releases first.

When you create an environment and select a region, you see the option to create the environment as an early release cycle environment. This option is named Get new features early. A subset of the regions currently have this capability, so the environment needs to be created in those specific regions.

Manage early release cycle environments

Early release cycle environments can be managed similarly to other environments in the Power platform admin center. You can identify early release cycle environments if they have the Early value in the Release cycle column.