97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 50. There’s No Such Thing as a Development Environment

Peter McCool

DevOps Manager at CT4

…it’s a candidate production system.

First up, a candidate production system isn’t the same as a real live production system—not even close. It has, however, reached the stage where you can do yourself, and your customers, a big favor by starting to think about what life will look like when it becomes one. Systems can get to this stage awfully quickly, which can easily catch you by surprise.

There’s a tendency, certainly on my part, to look at a development environment as nothing more than a piece of scaffolding: it’s there to help me write some code; then it gets torn down, and everyone moves on. This is a common assumption, completely understandable and replete with really unappealing implications. I contend we are all much better off looking at these environments as candidate production environments.

For one thing, systems have a habit of escaping. You may write a system thinking you’ll use it to do this one thing once. Then once turns into twice, and a year later, you’ve been using it to bill your real live customers for, like, a whole year—and it just sort of happened, both the system and the fact that it got so intimately involved with asking actual people to pay actual money. At least, that’s what my uncle’s dog’s best friend’s piano teacher tells me. Yeah. They also tell me ...