Test Environmentsfor Continuous Delivery …

… And why pre-productioncould be an anti-pattern

Clem Pickering

clement.pickering@callcreditgroup.comClement Pickering@clem_pickering

Traditional challenges with test environments

Lack of…

Access to…

Difference to live

Difference to each other

Performance of…

Speed of Provisioning

Added Agile Challenges

Frequency (Often)

NFRs (Early)

Empowerment (?)

Arghhh… Extra DevOps challenges

They want to deploy how often ?!! And did you say Live?

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

Local environments

System & Integration

Test

Performance Labs Pre-Prod Live

Environments to support the pipeline to live

Examples from Callcredit

Build machines from scratch nightly

Self-serve private cloud for SIT

Dedicated easily shared Perf labs

Scripted builds for servers

Pre-Production still a bottleneck

Differences between environments

Lack of automated deployments

Teams still lack full control and ownership

The trouble with Pre-Prod

Silo’d from live

Like live, but not live

Expensive (and wasteful?)

Another deployment

“Not our problem”

Q. What’s the most live

we can get?

A. Live

Definition of live

Virtualisation

Load-balancing

Configuration

Test environments…

Provide many challenges but are more important than ever…

Are part of a pipeline to live

Can be managed withDevOps principles

Should be owned as awhole and not in silos

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