In the cloud deployment model, the ERP service is fully managed by Microsoft, and Microsoft is responsible for actively monitoring the health of the production environment. 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 their performance and activities through the Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) environment's monitoring and telemetry tools. From deploying any new code to the production environment to any issue in the production environment, the Microsoft team finishes the job.

The Microsoft team will investigate the issue and work with the customers and partners to find a resolution. For application updates such as deploying a code update to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations, 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 life cycle and lists out the roles and responsibilities of Microsoft, customers, and partners in this process:

As shown in the preceding diagram, production environment provisioning starts with the customers and partners collecting the subscription estimation data and uploading it 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 create the appropriate hardware specifications for the production environment.

Once the production environment has been provisioned and all the development, testing, and training activities have been 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 setups for data migration, configuration, and integration, each 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 updates for their deployment through a regular servicing model.

Now, let's look at the on-premises deployment option.