Symmetrical environments

In a rapid-velocity deployment environment (where changes are pushed through a delivery pipeline rapidly), it is absolutely critical that any pre-production and production environments maintain a level of symmetry. That is to say, the deployment procedures and resulting installation of a software system are identical in every way possible among environments. For example, an organization may have the following environments:

• Development: Here, developers can test their changes and integration tactics. This environment acts as a playground for all things development oriented and provides developers with an area to validate their code changes and test the resulting impact.
• Quality-assurance environment: This environment comes after the development environment and provides QA personnel with a location to test and validate the code and resulting installation. This environment is usually released as a precursor environment, and the environment will need to pass stricter quality standards prior to a sign-off on a given build for release.
• Stage: This environment represents the final location prior to production, where all automated deployment techniques are validated and tested.
• Production: This environment represents the location where users/customers are actually working with the live install.