Types of Environments: What's The Right Setup for Your Product?
Why do we need different environments? Why do some products have 5+ environments and others have just 3 of them? What is the right setup for your product?
The purpose of creating multiple environments, types and management
The most popular setup for development environments is the following; development, testing, staging, production. Some products only have the 2 of them - development and production, others include pre-production, demo, e2e tests, etc.
Let's see the purpose of each environment, and the specifications for each.
Production Environment
Demo Environment
Pre-Production Environment
Integration
Sandbox
Stage
e2e Test
Test/QA
Development
What is the right setup for your product?
The "right" number of environments in software development depends on the complexity of the project, the size of the team, the nature of the application, regulatory requirements, and the risk tolerance of the organization.
For smaller projects or teams with limited resources
Teams that have limited resources and their product isn't complex or doesn't require high reliability can create the basic setup of environments;
Projects that require high reliability and involve complex deployments
For projects that require a higher level of reliability and where it's crucial to minimize the risk of errors in the production environment I suggest adding a staging environment so the setup looks like this;
Development Environment Testing/QA Environment Staging Production Environment
The last setup is suited for large-scale, complex, or highly regulated projects where multiple types of testing are required to ensure the software’s reliability, performance, and security. It may look like this.
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