In the cloud deployment model, Microsoft is responsible for actively monitoring the health of production environments. In case of any issue in the production environment, the Microsoft service engineering team is alerted. The team will investigate the issue and work with the customers and partners to find a resolution. Microsoft is also jointly responsible for sizing any application and for infrastructure updates. The customer and the partner will not have direct access to the production servers, but will be able to monitor the performance and activities through the LCS environment monitoring and telemetry tools. For application updates such as deploying a hotfix or updates to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, Enterprise edition, the customer typically deploys and tests the changes in the sandbox environment and then creates a service request to schedule the production deployment. The Microsoft service engineering team works on applying the deployment in the scheduled deployment window. Finally, the customer validates and provides sign off to close the release.

The following diagram shows the production environment lifecycle and lists out the roles and responsibilities of Microsoft, customers, and partners in this process:

As shown in the diagram, the production environment provisioning starts with the customers and partners collecting the subscription estimation data and uploading the same into the LCS subscription estimator tool. In the subscription estimation, you typically describe your implementation project, for example, the number of legal entities, countries, languages, users, master data, and transactions, including the batch and integration volume. This data helps the Microsoft team to create the appropriate hardware specs for the production environment.

Once the production environment is provisioned and all the development, testing, and training activities are completed and signed off, the project team works with Microsoft to deploy the final code, configuration, and master data. The customers or partners then perform additional data migration, configuration, and integration setup as part of the Go Live activities. Once the customers start using the production environment, they can monitor the performance and activities through LCS, and schedule and hotfix or update the deployment though a regular servicing model. In case of any environment-specific update, such as applying a critical security patch and other maintenance, the Microsoft team notifies the customer and schedules the maintenance window accordingly.