From the initial idea to the final polished product, software goes through various environments. Each environment, be it development, testing, or production, serves a specific purpose and requires its own set of configurations. Managing these multiple environments is often like navigating a complex multiverse – one wrong turn can cause lots of havoc.
In this article, we take a deep dive into the world of environment management through the perspective of Stepan Slyshov, our DevOps Engineer. Drawing from years of experience, Stepan shares insights into the purpose, challenges, advantages, and best practices for managing each of these environments effectively.
What is an environment in the context of software development?
An environment refers to the collection of technological resources and assets that a company employs to create, maintain, and deliver its applications or services. Throughout the development lifecycle, various environments are used to handle the needs of different teams, such as developers, testers, and operations staff.
Each business typically has its own unique development strategy that determines how many environments it needs, and when and how to use them. However, almost every company maintains at least two primary environments: the development environment, where initial coding and testing take place, and the production environment, where the final version of the software is deployed for actual use by customers or end-users.
What types of environments are typically utilized in software development?
Traditionally, you will come across the three most common types of environments - Development (often called just “dev”), Testing (in shorthand just “test” or “QA”), and Production (as you might have already guessed – “prod”). Sometimes, staging can also be there, taking its place between testing and production.
Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Development
The development environment is a shared workspace for developers. It is where they add new features, build and rework applications. This environment is usually deployed and executed locally. In this dynamic space, developers have the freedom to experiment, iterate, and test their creations in real time. It’s where ideas come to life.
Testing
The testing environment is used by the QA team to carry out both manual and automated tests in a controlled setting. It is essentially a smaller version of the actual production infrastructure. In many cases, you’ll see multiple testing environments serving different types of testing.
Having a test environment as an intermediary stage between development and production helps ensure that newly released features work smoothly by proactively identifying and reporting bugs and issues to the development team.
Staging
The staging environment serves as the closest copy of production that is accessible to a restricted number of people. Its purpose is to simulate real-world usage, allowing stakeholders to evaluate the user experience.
Production
Production is the final destination in the software development journey. It is an instance of the application available to end-users, equipped with robust security measures, scalability to handle heavy loads, and fail-safes to ensure uninterrupted service.
What are the advantages of using multiple environments?
I can emphasize three main advantages of using multiple environments:
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Isolation. Multiple environments provide isolated instances of your application that do not harm/interfere with one another. The isolation gives teams the freedom to experiment, test, and iron out every change before it is rolled out without risking the stability of the whole system and user experience.
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Better code quality. Having multiple environments also means more test runs, more reviews, and more approvals, which ultimately contributes to greater software quality. Each environment is like a checkpoint, allowing you to catch issues before they affect end-users.
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More flexibility with deployment strategies. Multiple environments also allow you to experiment with different deployment strategies and select the best approach for each case. In this way, you can minimize the risk of disruptions and establish a smooth and reliable release process.
What are some common challenges organizations face when managing multiple environments?
Handling multiple environments often feels like juggling - it’s challenging, but with the right set of skills and proper approach it can be done smoothly. From my experience, I can highlight the following challenges you’re likely to face:
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Managing permissions. With multiple environments, you often have to carefully manage permissions for different teams or even team members in the same group. Making sure that everyone has access to the right parts of the project without compromising security can be a difficult task, especially for large projects.
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Higher costs. Maintaining multiple copies of environments means more infrastructure, more resources, and as a result more costs for provisioning, maintenance, and licensing. To prevent budget straining, you need to carefully plan resource allocation.
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Complex branching and promotion strategies. Multiple environments require a more complicated branching and promotion strategy to effectively manage the flow of change deployments from development through testing and finally to production. It is important to thoroughly plan and coordinate code merges, version control, and promoting changes across environments to keep changes moving smoothly.
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More time-consuming. Managing multiple environments can be time-consuming, especially during the initial stages when everyone is still getting familiar with the process. However, once the workflow is established, it becomes smooth sailing.
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Security concerns. Maintaining security across multiple environments can also be challenging. Each environment may have different security requirements and configurations, making it difficult to establish consistent security measures across environments.
What strategies do you find effective in ensuring consistency across different environments?
There are several effective strategies that help to manage and keep things consistent across different environments:
Tagging and promotion strategy
Implementing a proper tagging and promotion strategy where the same build has multiple tags that are used by different environments can be really helpful. By doing so, you can always trace the lifecycle of each build and it is easier to roll back if necessary. With tagging, you always know what exact build is currently deployed on a specific environment and its corresponding build on others.
Detailed documentation
Having detailed documentation is also crucial. It provides you with the necessary information and illustrated charts outlining the entire flow from local development to production deployment. Clear documentation will keep everyone on the same page, ensuring that the team understands the deployment process and can follow it consistently.
Access control
When it comes to dealing with multiple environments, limiting access to promote and deploy builds to different environments based on their role helps to prevent chaos and reduce the risk of errors and unauthorized changes. By assigning role-based permissions, you improve accountability and be sure that only the right people can deploy to each environment.
Standardized templates
Using standardized templates can be a good idea in some scenarios. Templates can include predefined configurations, settings, and dependencies, which allows you to quickly set up and configure environments. This can help you to streamline the setup process and ensure consistency across all environments.
Can you provide examples of tools or technologies that facilitate the management of multiple environments effectively?
Nowadays, it seems like almost every piece of software comes with features to help you manage multiple environments. Whether it’s built-in functionality or third-party integrations, you’ve got lots of options to suit your needs. For example, tools that support multibranch pipelines and track them correctly (like Gitlab CI, Jenkins) and solutions with built-in functionality to handle multiple environments dynamically like Terraform, Ansible, or Puppet. Chances are that even your project management tool or collaboration platform can have some features you can use to make managing environments easier.
Personally, I also believe that tags and releases in Git become your best friends when it comes to keeping track of different versions of your software. It’s like putting sticky notes on your code to mark important milestones, making it easy to keep everything organized.
Wrapping up
Dealing with multiple environments might seem an overwhelming and complicated task at first sight. However, once you get familiar with the workflow and know what’s expected from each environment, it just becomes a part of the development process that allows you to provide a better app to end-users. With the right tools and strategies in place, you can navigate the challenges and eliminate bottlenecks associated with development, testing, staging, and production with ease.