The Microsoft Dynamics Lifecycle Services (LCS) team is happy to announce the immediate availability of the release notes for LCS (July 2018, release 1).
Change in the process of applying updates to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations on-premises environment
With today’s release of LCS, you will see a change in the process of applying updates to your Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations on-premises environment. Previously for an on-premises deployment, after you clicked Apply Updates in the Environment details page it would mark the start of the downtime for your environment even though the update steps that directly impacted the environment would start much later. The initial time was spent on downloading the package and preparing the environment for the update, however the environment was not updated during the execution of these steps.
To reduce the overall downtime and increase reliability we have divided the servicing operation into two activities – Preparation and Servicing. The Preparation activity is where all tasks needed for servicing (such as formatting the package, downloading the package, taking code backups, etc.) are completed. During this time, the on-premises environment is not accessed and there is no downtime for the environment or the users using the system. The Servicing activity is where the actual deployment takes place, this is a downtime for the environment. Customers now have the option to prepare the environment before starting the actual downtime for servicing. This will reduce the overall downtime needed to update your on-premises environment. To use this feature, you will need the latest version of the local agent (such as Version 2.1.0). For details on how to use this feature, refer to the Apply Updates documentation.
Performance Improvements to the Cloud Hosted Environment page and Azure Connectors page
With this release of LCS, we have made performance improvements to the Cloud Hosted Environments page and Azure Connectors page. This should help to improve the overall experience of using these pages.