How to create a Scheduled cloud flow in Power Automate?

Am I going back to the real basics of Power Automate? No not really. Have you ever tried to create a scheduled cloud flow as part a solution, while your flows shouldn’t trigger at the same time?

The setup of scheduled cloud flows

In my scheduled flows I have Power Automate make a lot of updates to SharePoint but any other connector would probably give similar results. The flow will run for just over an hour and I want to make sure that my flows in Development, Test and Production don’t run at the same time.

Now, when I create my flow in Development I can select the starting time, and the schedule. but the trigger is incapable of consuming any dynamic content or expressions. When I select a time for the flow to run I will need to select a specific time.

This now means that in Development, Test and Production, my flows will run at the same time. While I’m putting SharePoint under pressure in my flow I definitely don’t want the flows to run at the same time as that would slow down my flows and give me 429 errors and retries.

Schedule flows dynamically

To solve the issue I started by creating an environment variable as shown below.

Then I’m adding a delay step to my flow. So that there is a delay before I’m doing the heavy work in my flow.

How to schedule the flows for the various environments?

Now, I would probably let the flow in the production environment run first without a delay (set the environment variable to 0) then test 2 hours later to make sure that my 1 hour flow will get enough time. Then in Development schedule it with a 4 hour delay. Giving each environment some extra time to complete.