Mystery environment 'PlatformEnv-unitedkingdom' created over 20 instances of itself and taken me well over capacity

[LucyCC]

I have a Power Apps Premium licence and therefore 10.25GB Database capacity, 2GB of Log and 22GB of File.

I have the default environment, one trial environment (created when I set up a trial subscription, before I paid for a licence), three sandbox environments and one production environment. One of the sandbox environments has Dynamics 365 apps enabled, and I've set up a Deployment Pipeline Configuration on that environment. The remaining two sandbox environments are my development and test environments for an app that I'm building, with the production environment being the managed environment for the live version of the app. The app is tiny as this is all just a test build to learn about pipelines.

The trial environment does not count towards my capacity usage.

The remaining environments together take up no more than 6GB Dataverse, 11GB File and 1GB Log. This means I should be within capacity.

However, I have another environment called 'PlatformEnv-unitedkingdom' which I did not create, which exits 21 times, with all these instances together taking up around 21GB of Dataverse and 23GB of File. These bring me well over capacity and I've an alert telling me so.

I logged a support ticket on Thursday but I'm guessing the Easter break means I won't hear back from Microsoft soon. Does anyone have any ideas about what happened and how I can fix it? Thank you!

[LucyCC]

Replying to my own comment. I've now found that this is a known issue (albeit apparently 'Resolved') where by a system-created environment of type 'Platform' unexpectedly appears. Screenshot of issue attached. This known issue was created on 22nd March. I'm still affected by the problem though.

[rsamis]

I have a similar environment in my tenant: PlatformEnv-canada. It's not consuming any Dataverse capacity, but I noticed it when I tried to add some environments to a new pipeline. When I added environments they failed validation with the error "Envrionment [env ID1] is already configured with Pipelines in host environment [env ID2]. Please delete the environment from the other host to add the environment to this host environment [env ID3] or perform a Force Link." When I looked up the [env ID2] it was this PlatformEnv-canada that shows up in Resources > Capacity > Dataverse and in PP Admin View > Environments, but not in PPAC > Environments. So far I haven't found a way to access pipelines in the mystery environment or how to do a "force link".

[rsamis]

Hi Lucy, 

What is the KB# of the known issue you posted? I'd like to cite it in my support ticket. Thanks.

[LucyCC · Accepted solution]

I found the issue by going to Help and Support on the Power Platform admin centre, it is in Known Issues. The link is https://admin.powerplatform.microsoft.com/knownissues/3915042

It is now marked as resolved. All my instances of the platform environment still exist, but they are no longer sucking up my capacity, and I can now create fresh environments (previously I was blocked because of inadequate capacity).

In my correspondence with Microsoft I was told:

Platform type environment, is used by the system features to make first-party cross-environment apps, such as power platform Pipelines, available to customers and their users without the need for the customer to create and configure production environments that consume their paid capacity.  

Please note that this environment is not using your tenant space allocations, although it is not seen in the standard list of environments, but it can be discovered in various other ways as it is currently in preview state. 
This environment is not on the standard list of environments on PPAC, so as not to confuse users, but at some point it would be discovered.

Although this new feature is yet to be formally documented for public consumption, I have made a request to the publishing team to have it documented as a formal type, describe the usage of it, how it gets created, that it is not billed, and provide our customers with sufficient information about it.  This documentation can then be used referenced for easy understanding of the issue. The team confirmed that they have begun an action on this, however, I was not provided with an ETA as they were yet to ascertain that.  

in the meantime, the only feature that is using this environment type is the public preview of pipelines.  A user in your organization must have clicked on the pipeline button in maker and this triggered it to be created behind the scenes.  Pipeline records are created, and the deployment system will work with no admin intervention.   

Tenant admins will be able to launch the pipeline administration experience to manage the pipeline from within that environment. 

PPAC admin surfaces will be delivered shortly to allow tenant admins to manage the features that use the platform environment shortly.

It seems that is is something to do with Personal Pipelines (currently in preview, I think they've only been around a couple of weeks).

Good luck with your issue.

[rsamis]

Thanks very much for the additional information. I've opened my own support ticket with MS, but your reply is highly relevant to the issue I'm seeing.