I’ve tried to make this article series as accessible as possible for people without significant experience with Software Development and Operations, whilst at the same time trying to ensure it’s also of use for those that do. This particular article is intended as a cheat-sheet for those in the former camp, covering some fairly basic principals necessary to get the most out of the series. Those in the latter camp are likely to already be familiar with the content, in which case you have my permission to skip ahead to the next article.

The concept of an environment is particularly useful when the same application is deployed to different environments. The environments’ independence and isolation from one another creates opportunities to undertake different kinds of activities in each without one affecting the other.

Testing software in any environment other than the production environment would be futile if we didn’t have confidence that the application being tested will behave the same once in the production environment as it does where it is being tested.