Overview presentation of some thoughts around test environment challenges in the context of continuous delivery. Including why pre-production environments could be an anti-pattern

3. Clem Pickering
clement.pickering@callcreditgroup.com
Clement Pickering
@clem_pickering

4. Traditional challenges with
test environments
Lack of…
Access to…
Difference to live
Difference to each other
Performance of…
Speed of Provisioning

5. Added Agile Challenges
Frequency (Often)
NFRs (Early)
Empowerment (?)

6. Arghhh… Extra DevOps challenges
They want to deploy how often ?!! And did you say Live?

7. But what if it shouldn’t
be that hard?
Continuous Delivery is
an achievable and
worthwhile goal
Test environments are a
crucial part of the pipe
to live

8. Environments to support the pipeline to live
Local
environments
System &
Integration
Test
Performance
Labs
Pre-Prod Live

9. Examples from Callcredit
Build machines from scratch nightly
Self-serve private cloud for SIT
Dedicated easily shared Perf labs
Scripted builds for servers

10. Pre-Production still a bottleneck
Differences between environments
Lack of automated deployments
Teams still lack full control and ownership

11. The trouble with Pre-Prod
Silo’d from live
Like live, but not live
Expensive (and wasteful?)
Another deployment
“Not our problem”

12. Q. What’s the most live
we can get?
A. Live
Definition of live
Virtualisation
Load-balancing
Configuration

13. Test environments…
Provide many challenges but are
more important than ever…
Are part of a pipeline to live
Can be managed with
DevOps principles
Should be owned as a
whole and not in silos

14. TL;DR version:
Test environments are crucial in the pipeline to live
If Pre-Prod is supposed to be like live but never is,
maybe it’s time to use live