Development environment

In software deployment an environment or tier is a computer system in which a computer program or software component is deployed and executed. In simple cases, such as developing and immediately executing a program on the same machine, there may be a single environment, but in industrial use the development environment (where changes are originally made) and production environment (what end users use) are separated; often with several stages in between. This structured release management process allows phased deployment (rollout), testing, and rollback in case of problems. In software deployment an environment or tier is a computer system in which a computer program or software component is deployed and executed. In simple cases, such as developing and immediately executing a program on the same machine, there may be a single environment, but in industrial use the development environment (where changes are originally made) and production environment (what end users use) are separated; often with several stages in between. This structured release management process allows phased deployment (rollout), testing, and rollback in case of problems. Environments may vary significantly in size: the development environment is typically an individual developer's workstation, while the production environment may be a network of many geographically distributed machines in data centers, or virtual machines in cloud computing. Code, data, and configuration may be deployed in parallel, and need not connect to the corresponding tier – for example, pre-production code might connect to a production database. Deployment architectures vary significantly, but, broadly, the tiers are bookended by starting at development (DEV) and ending at production (PROD). A common 4-tier architecture is development, testing, model, production (DEV, TEST, MODL, PROD), with software being deployed to each in order. Other common environments include Quality Control (QC), for acceptance testing; sandbox or experimental (EXP), for experiments that are not intended to proceed to production; and Disaster Recovery, to provide an immediate fallback in case of problems with production. Another common architecture is development, testing, acceptance and production (DTAP).