"Can I Get a Staging Environment?" - Answer this question once and for all

Staging environments - you all know, love, and need them. They streamline your processes and make everything less costly. But what happens when you need another one, then another one, and many more after that? 

Relying on a single staging environment is common, especially for smaller teams. However, as an organization grows, so do the complexities of a single staging environment. Since devs share time in an environment, maintaining it is of the utmost importance as data changes and issues are found and fixed. 

Thankfully, there are ways to maintain your environment and not burn out your devs. Read about what happens when you start experiencing bottlenecks within your organization, the solutions that can help you streamline your process, and Bunnyshell’s Environment as a Service solution that gets you the most out of your staging environment(s).  

The idea behind a bottleneck in a staging environment is fairly simple - with one or a few devs, a single staging environment is sufficient. The complexity of your systems is low, and your staging environment is manageable. But to the detriment of many organizations, complexities start to occur when you need to duplicate environments, automatically create new environments, move code from one environment to another, etc, etc. When these issues arise, it can affect your organization in the following ways:

To avoid such bottlenecks that affect your staging environments and to increase product velocity instead, integrate the below environments into your production line and invest in your infrastructure - the right way.   

There probably isn’t anything more annoying for devs than repetitive manual work, including:

When teams have only one staging environment, user stories can pile up, or pull requests can hang around for too long. Additionally, if staging environments aren’t immediately available for reviewers to verify changes, they’ll queue it and move on, taking up space and resources. That’s why teams require multiple on-demand staging environments (to be ready whenever reviewers are and deleted after use). Basically, you must have enough staging environments, so you never run out of them. These should be:

An Environment as a Service (EaaS) solution helps you optimize your staging environments, but more on that in a bit.     

Ephemeral environments allow you to use your staging environments in isolation, so you’re not interfering with other team members. They’re also great because devs can visually review changes and share a link with any non-technical team members. Additionally, they help minimize rework, in turn improving development velocity. 

The best part? Ephemeral environments remove the staging bottleneck. How? You have a limitless supply of environments you can use for testing, so you’ll no longer need a single testing and integration environment to merge your code before it goes to production. Plus, you’re able to identify quality issues earlier in the development cycle, reducing rework and tedious, repetitive work.  

To quickly and more efficiently deploy ephemeral environments, it’s best to use:

And just as with staging environments, you can have on-demand ephemeral environments, so you never run out! It’s also cheaper this way (compared to a single, shared staging environment) since you’re only using what you need and discarding the rest. 

Having more staging environments comes with its own set of challenges, and there are many things to keep in mind, including how often to test and allowing for feedback at various points of the process. Thankfully, training environments allow you to create multiple environments to test different configurations, features, or datasets to eliminate bugs or coding issues and get the best possible outcome. 

Also, you can involve all stakeholders in the process with product demos created more quickly and efficiently while getting every member on the same page with reliable training and fast onboarding. And remember, training environments are more reliable than test environments because of their experimentation possibilities. 

Pssst, an EaaS solution helps here, too. Read on to find out how.

An Environment as a Service solution drastically reduces bottlenecks in many areas, especially in all of the above (and below) scenarios:

As you can see, an Environment as a Service solution provides a consistent way to manage all of your different environments (and we understand you may have a lot). We at Bunnyshell understand that staging environments are critical to building software, but sometimes building and maintaining them can be extremely costly and time-consuming. 

That’s why we offer an excellent EaaS solution for your organizational needs. So, to answer your initial question - yes, you can get a staging environment. 

Oh, and don’t forget to read how to bring down other bottlenecks in our Reducing Bottlenecks in Software Development article.