Common Data Service (CDS) is a shared database for storing business entities that connects to Dynamics 365, Flow, and PowerApps. It is the fabric behind Dynamics 365 and Office 365 to provide consistently structured entities across services spanning solutions within Dynamics 365 as well as external applications.

CDS gives a secure and encrypted business database, comprising well-formed standard business entities that can be deployed for use in your organization. It provides not only structured metadata, rich data types, auto numbering, lookups, and business data types such as address and currency, but also capabilities such as referential integrity through metadata configuration and cascade deletes, making a compelling functionality. CDS is licensed together with PowerApps as a stand-alone solution and is included in two different versions with Dynamics 365.

The following is a glimpse of managing entities within CDS with other tools such as connections, gateways, notifications, and others:

CDS makes it very smooth to communicate between different Dynamics 365 apps.