Applications typically progress through multiple environments before release. Environment separation ensures isolation and that no action in one of the environments have impacts on the others. As such, the productive environment is safe while application development and testing can progress safely. The typical environment separation is:
- Development environments are for coding and early testing. They often contain mock data and are less hardened.
- Test environments allow quality assurance teams to validate functionality and security.
- Staging environments replicate production as closely as possible to identify final issues before deployment. Here code waits to be deployed to production until a maintenance window appears.
- Production environments host live applications accessible by users and are subject to the strictest security controls.