Tips for Your RightAngle Environment Structure

Determining how to organize your RightAngle environment structure can be challenging. It involves balancing your needs with your pocketbook and designing a structure which efficiently works through your hierarchy to deployment. Let’s unpack a few of these concepts and get you started. 

Balancing your needs starts by understanding what they even are. We recommend IT leaders ask their various teams what needs they have within the RightAngle system. Some of the questions we usually ask include:

• How many developers need a full-functioning environment to unit test?
  • Can they unit test their items in a shared environment or locally?
• Do I need an environment which is always a nightly copy from production for Support & business investigation/fixing? (In general, we always advise ‘yes’ to this question. It can really save you in the middle of a production emergency!)
• Do I plan to have a pre-prod deployment environment where Production deployments are UAT tested as a wholistic patch before deployment?
• Are there any special projects which need a persistent environment without outside activity?
  • Does this project require a ‘non-pristine’ version which can be refreshed but is still protected from outside activity?

This list will get you started in your effort to understand your environment needs. It goes without saying, but answering ‘yes’ to any of the above questions generally represents an environment you likely require. But this list also forces you to ask if individuals can share environments at various levels. 

The tighter your budget, the more you might drive sharing spaces within your environments. The upside is savings, but the downsides can be delayed development, testing, or deployment due to conflicting workstreams sharing the same environment. 

Once you have an idea of what you might need, you must evaluate the best way to structure the environments to serve your teams. Traditional structures follow something similar to the diagram below, which we see most commonly with our customers. 

This structure allows you to achieve a natural flow of new development > testing arena > final staging to ensure all changes work cohesively before deploying into your Production environment. It also sets up your business and support teams for success with a Production Support environment for investigation, testing new business modeling, and data fix scripts. 

Questions you should be asking for structuring your own environment if the above doesn’t match your needs might be some of the following:

1. How often will my developers produce new items that require testing?
2. Will I have hardware that matches Production in a Staging environment? 
3. Does my testing require hardware to simulate production performance? Is performance in testing a concern for me?
4. How often will I be doing releases into Production? Does this justify the maintenance/cost of a Staging environment, or can I suffice these deployments through a clean Test refresh?

Each customer is different, and the development lifecycle can help drive the selection of environments. When it comes to RightAngle or any product you have to maintain internally, selecting your hierarchy of environments can be a daunting task. 

You can get started with the tips above or call Triarc (832-559-0910) for more assistance. We’d love to assess your internal needs, examine your processes, and make recommendations for how to structure your environments and size them.