Ever seen an ALM consultant treat your PROD like a cow?
A few years back, someone in the Power Platform ALM world had a bright idea: “What if we treat every Dataverse environment like cattle?”
If you’re new to the term: “Pets vs cattle” comes from DevOps. Pets are unique and cared for individually (like that one server you nurse back to health). Cattle are identical and replaceable — if one goes down, you just bring in another.
It made sense for DevOps servers. Lose one, rebuild it from code. Easy. It even works for ISV environments — clean, controlled, no customer data.
But somehow, that thinking escaped the ISV farm… and wandered straight into customer projects.
Suddenly, consultants were applying ALM pipelines as if every environment could be wiped and rebuilt from scratch. Including… PROD.
“We could nuke PROD anytime and rebuild it.”
Here’s the problem: – Your customer’s PROD is not disposable. – It’s where all the real data lives. – It has those little PROD-only tweaks that never make it into Dev. – If it’s gone, the business stops.
The reality? – Dev & Test: fine, treat them like cattle. – Customer PROD: it’s a pet. With a name. And you care a lot about it.
Once you accept that PROD is a pet, your ALM pipeline changes completely. It stops being about wiping and recreating, and starts being about protecting, nurturing, and evolving what’s already there.
Rules like “use managed solutions in PROD” for customer-only customizations will start to make less sense with this different perspective.
Moral of the story: Your PROD isn’t a cow. Stop trying to milk it for ALM purity.
How do you treat your PROD? As pet or cattle?
