About the World We Lived In
Explore the evolution of testing and deployment strategies from mutable environments to immutable containers. Understand the challenges of maintaining production-like testing environments and how container immutability offers consistency across stages. Learn why final release validation depends on real user feedback in production, setting the stage for advanced deployment techniques.
We'll cover the following...
The necessity to test new releases before deploying them to production is as old as our industry. Over time, we developed elaborate processes aimed at ensuring that our releases are ready for production.
- We were testing them locally.
- Then, we were deploying them to testing environments where we would test them more.
- When we were comfortable with the quality, we were deploying those releases to integration and pre-production environments.
- The final round of validations was done in these environments.
Typically, the closer we were getting to releasing something to production, the more similar our environments were to production. That was a lengthy process that would last for months, sometimes even years.
Managing different environments
Why are we moving our releases through different environments? The answer lies in the difficulties in maintaining production-like environments.
In the past, it took a lot of effort to manage environments, and the more they looked like production, the more work they required. Later on, we adopted configuration management tools like ...