I want to adopt Salesforce DX development. Do I have to enable Dev Hub in my Prod Org, or can I activate it in a new Developer Edition, do my development in scratch orgs and eventually deploy the packages to my DEV, QA, UAT and PROD orgs?
Background: I am a developer and currently we develop in our personal dev sandboxes and push our code through other sandboxes (DEV, QA, UAT) and then to Prod org. My company does not want to give developers Prod access at all, even limited access licenses, so I don't think we should enable Dev Hub in Prod.
So I need to know if having a Dev Hub org that is not my Prod org is ok.
Best Answer
Dev Hub can be enabled in Developer Edition orgs, but the scratch org limits are significantly lower than in paid Salesforce production orgs. In a Developer Edition org, the limits are just 3 active and 6 daily scratch orgs, which might suffice for an individual developer who is not using continuous integration but can be stifling in a process that likes to use a lot of orgs. It's not feasible to share a Developer Edition Dev Hub across a team; each developer would need their own.
Production orgs, as described in the linked documentation, offer an order of magnitude more scratch orgs. To use Dev Hub in production, you can request special free, limited access licenses (I wasn't sure if that's what you were alluding to in your question) to enable developers to authenticate and create scratch orgs against Prod, without viewing CRM data.
Of course, some organizations may be unwilling for compliance or process reasons even to use those licenses, in which case you don't have much recourse other than a separate paid org or multiple Developer Editions.