Lifecycle Services (LCS) is one of the most important components of the Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition architecture. LCS is a Microsoft Azure-based collaboration portal that provides a unifying, collaborative environment along with a set of regularly updated services that help you manage the application lifecycle of your Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition implementations.

The following diagram shows the various services supported by LCS during the implementation, upgrade, and support phases of Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition:

As is clearly evident, LCS is used throughout the lifecycle of the project. You will learn about the different tools available in detail throughout this book.

The application lifecycle management for on-premise deployments is also orchestrated through LCS. Customers can use LCS to help manage their on-premise deployments. The following diagram shows the on-premise ALM  process through LCS:

As shown in the diagram, similar to cloud deployment, LCS can be used to synchronize the LCS project artifacts to VSTS. The developer can use the one box cloud machine or already downloaded machines to get the latest code in their development environment. Once done, the code is checked in the VSTS. The cloud build environment can pull the latest code and generate the deployable artifacts that can be uploaded to the LCS asset library. The on-premise, production, or sandbox environment can be serviced directly through LCS with the help of the environment orchestrator within the service fabric standalone cluster node.

For more details on LCS, refer to Chapter 2, Implementation Methodology and Tools.

Let's now explore the development architecture in the next subsection.