Production Environment
A Production Environment is a deployment environment that services production services (that users directly interact with).
- Example(s):
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Deploying to Production, Development Environment, Deployment Environment, Domestic Canary, Feature Flag, Hot Swapping.
References
2020
- (Wikipedia, 2020) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deployment_environment#Production Retrieved:2020-5-1.
- The production environment is also known as live, particularly for servers, as it is the environment that users directly interact with.
Deploying to production is the most sensitive step; it may be done by deploying new code directly (overwriting old code, so only one copy is present at a time), or by deploying a configuration change. This can take various forms: deploying a parallel installation of a new version of code, and switching between them with a configuration change; deploying a new version of code with the old behavior and a feature flag, and switching to the new behavior with a configuration change that performs a flag flip; or by deploying separate servers (one running the old code, one the new) and redirecting traffic from old to new with a configuration change at the traffic routing level. These in turn may be done all at once or gradually, in phases.
Deploying a new release generally requires a restart, unless hot swapping is possible, and thus requires either an interruption in service (usual for user software, where applications are restarted), or redundancy – either restarting instances slowly behind a load balancer, or starting up new servers ahead of time and then simply redirecting traffic to the new servers.
When deploying a new release to production, rather than immediately deploying to all instances or users, it may be deployed to a single instance or fraction of users first, and then either deployed to all or gradually deployed in phases, in order to catch any last-minute problems. This is similar to staging, except actually done in production, and is referred to as a canary release, by analogy with coal mining. This adds complexity due to multiple releases being run simultaneously, and is thus usually over quickly, to avoid compatibility problems.
- The production environment is also known as live, particularly for servers, as it is the environment that users directly interact with.
2017
- https://techopedia.com/definition/8989/production-environment
- QUOTE: ... Production environment is a term used mostly by developers to describe the setting where software and other products are actually put into operation for their intended uses by end users. A production environment can be thought of as a real-time setting where programs are run and hardware setups are installed and relied on for organization or commercial daily operations. ...