Environments as a Service

Picture this: you built a house from the ground up. Your house has different possible uses - you can choose to live in it, turn it into a business or a medical centre, or continue to build alongside it. Whatever it is you decide to do with your house, your decision requires planning and preparation so your house can be resilient. However, the process to build your house remains the same. 

In an ideal situation, your development team is productive and delivers a great app with minimal downtime. Does this sound too good to be true? That usually means it is.

You want to deliver a flawless app to your stakeholders, not overwork your team members, and get to production within your allotted time frame. But wait, a bottleneck appears. 

Software as a Service (SaaS) is now the largest segment in the public cloud market. This model transformed having to be a large “well-oiled” company with lots of resources to virtually anyone being able to turn their ideas into software distributed to customers worldwide. 

SaaS businesses are popular and on the rise now more than ever. So how do you get an edge over your competition and stand out from the crowd? 

You ensure your customers are getting better services 24/7. The customers depend on you.

SaaS companies constantly make improvements and develop new features (big and small) to enhance user experience and “keep up with the times” for each product. In turn, they’re optimizing their SaaS release management process each time. Or are they? 

Is keeping your codebase stable a vital thing for you and your team?

What about the possibility of multiple developers working on a particular feature without disturbing that codebase?

Every other type of environment has been mentioned so far, except for training environments. Yet they are essential for learning about the software you’re working on and coming up with solutions to bugs or other issues.

Manual testing is time-consuming, and your CI/CD pipeline struggles without speed, but you want to deliver robust and reliable software to your customers. How do you do that? Through test automation. Although it can be pricier initially, it ends up being cost-effective in the end if done right. 

There are different kinds of testing environments as part of the deployment process. But, in this article, we’ll focus on staging environments and their best practices to optimize deployment.