Use multiple environments

Using Multiple Environments for Development and Testing
Using multiple environments is essential for experimenting, developing, and testing your workload effectively. By employing separate environments for development, testing, staging, and production, teams can ensure that changes are thoroughly validated before deployment. Introducing increasing levels of control and rigor as environments approach production helps gain confidence that workloads will operate as intended.

Separate Environments for Development, Testing, and Production

Create distinct environments for different stages of the development lifecycle:

• Development Environment: A flexible environment for developers to experiment, write code, and prototype features.
• Testing Environment: Used to perform various tests, such as unit, integration, performance, and user acceptance testing.
• Staging Environment: A near-replica of the production environment to validate changes before final deployment.
• Production Environment: The live environment that serves end users and handles real-world workloads.

Maintaining separate environments ensures that experiments and testing activities do not interfere with the stability of the production environment.

Increase Controls as Environments Approach Production

Apply increasing levels of control and rigor as changes move through the development lifecycle and approach production. This includes:

• Testing and Validation: In the testing and staging environments, implement comprehensive testing procedures, including functional, performance, and security tests.
• Access Control: Restrict access to environments closer to production, allowing only authorized individuals to make changes.
• Change Management: Introduce formal change management processes in staging and production environments to ensure changes are reviewed and approved before implementation.

Gain Confidence with Realistic Testing

Use the staging environment to perform realistic tests that replicate the production setup as closely as possible. Testing in an environment that mirrors production provides greater confidence that workloads will operate as expected after deployment. This helps catch configuration issues, performance bottlenecks, or potential failures before they impact end users.

Automate Environment Creation and Maintenance

Automate the creation and maintenance of environments to reduce manual effort, minimize errors, and ensure consistency across environments. Automated provisioning helps ensure that environments are set up consistently and that development, testing, and staging environments match production as closely as possible.

Supporting Questions

• How are multiple environments used to experiment, develop, and test workloads?
• What controls are applied as environments approach production to ensure reliability?
• How is the consistency of environments maintained across different stages?

Roles and Responsibilities

Developer
Responsibilities:

• Use development environments for experimenting and building features.
• Validate changes in the testing environment before promoting them to staging.

QA Engineer
Responsibilities:

• Perform comprehensive testing in the testing and staging environments.
• Ensure that tests in staging reflect real-world scenarios to gain confidence in the production deployment.

DevOps Engineer
Responsibilities:

• Automate the creation and maintenance of multiple environments to ensure consistency.
• Apply increasing levels of control and security as changes move through staging and production environments.

Artifacts

• Environment Deployment Plan: A document outlining the setup, purpose, and controls for each environment (development, testing, staging, production).
• Testing and Validation Checklist: A checklist used to verify that all required tests have been completed before promoting changes to the next environment.
• Access Control Policy: A policy that defines access permissions and restrictions for each environment to ensure secure operations.

Relevant AWS Tools

Environment Provisioning Tools

• AWS CloudFormation: Automates the provisioning of environments using templates, ensuring consistency across development, testing, staging, and production.
• AWS Elastic Beanstalk: Provides an easy way to deploy and manage applications in multiple environments, automating the provisioning of infrastructure.

Environment Management and Security Tools

• AWS Systems Manager: Manages and maintains multiple environments, providing capabilities for patching, monitoring, and automation.
• AWS IAM (Identity and Access Management): Controls access to different environments, applying stricter controls for environments closer to production.

Monitoring and Validation Tools

• Amazon CloudWatch: Monitors the health and performance of workloads across environments, ensuring that testing and validation are effective before deployment to production.
• AWS CodePipeline: Automates the build, test, and deployment processes, promoting changes through different environments based on defined criteria and quality checks.