Key terms and concepts in environment management
Environment management might not be the most exciting topic to wake up to, but mastering it is crucial for driving digital transformation and making the most out of cloud and DevOps practices, all leading to enhanced organizational performance.
Even if you currently find yourself restricted by outdated environments, on-site infrastructure, and old processes, rest assured, there’s a way forward. You can make incremental changes and evolve towards a system where:
Setting up environments takes a matter of seconds, not weeks.
Teams can easily manage and maintain their own environments.
Dependencies between environments are a thing of the past, allowing teams to work independently.
Test data is clean, readily available, and useful for teams right away.
Deployments happen quickly and frequently, without any hiccups from environment management.
The availability of environments is significantly higher, resulting in faster and more testing.
Environment management is a part of every stage of the Software Delivery Lifecycle (SDLC), from development, through build and test phases, and all the way to live; this whole journey is known as the Route to Live (RtL).
Environment management might not grab headlines, but its mastery is a game-changer for any organization aiming to thrive in the digital age.
Understanding Environment Management: Essential Terms
Development: This is where the magic happens in coding. Developers write or modify code to create updates, improvements, or fix issues in a software product, service, or platform.
Environment: Think of this as the playground where your application or a part of it runs. It's available for teams to work on pre-production tasks (like developing, building, or testing), and it's what your customers interact with in the live production.
Environment Provisioning: This is all about setting up and preparing an environment, making it ready for users to jump in and start using.
Functional Testing: These tests are like quality check-ups, ensuring that the software functions correctly, delivers the expected features, and plays well with other systems.
Live: This is the production environment in its prime time, where customers interact with your application.
Non-Functional Testing: This testing goes beyond just functionality, checking if the software meets essential criteria like speed, security, reliability, and compliance.
Path-to-Production/Route-to-Live: These terms are interchangeable, referring to the journey an application (or a part of it) takes from the development phase all the way to the live, production environment.
Pre-Production: This stage encompasses all the activities and steps that occur before the software enhancements are ready and made available to customers in the live environment.
Production: This is the final version of your software, complete with its supporting infrastructure, ready for customer access.
Testing: This broad term includes all the quality checks done to ensure both functional and non-functional requirements are met.
Value Stream: This is the entire journey from a customer's initial request to the final delivery of the product or service, encompassing all necessary activities.Understanding these key terms lays a foundation for mastering Environment Management and ensuring seamless transitions through the stages of software delivery.
