Environments

An environment is one full copy of the service, such as development, staging or production. The rules here keep the copies alike, so a change that works in staging works in production. They also keep them apart, so a mistake in one cannot reach the others. Test data and the staging copy itself are covered in Keep a staging copy with fake data.

Required

• Give each environment its own account

  Required

  Run production in its own cloud account, project or subscription. Development, staging and previews each live in another one.

• Build every environment from the same code

  Required

  Build all environments from the same modules. Let them differ only in values such as sizes, counts and names, kept in one file per environment.

• Change staging before production

  Required

  Apply every infrastructure change to staging first. Apply the same commit to production only after the staging apply and its smoke tests pass.

• Start every account from one baseline

  Required

  Create every new account from code with the same baseline. That means an audit log, a budget, blocked public storage, default encryption and the allowed regions.

Recommended

• Delete preview environments on time

  Recommended

  Give each pull request its own short-lived environment from the same code. Delete it when the pull request closes, and after 72 hours at most.

• Turn on threat detection in every account

  Recommended

  Turn on the cloud's managed threat detection in every account and region you use. Send high and critical findings to the on-call team within 15 minutes.