Problem Statement
What is typical environment progression in CI/CD?
Explanation
Standard environment progression: Development (dev) for active development and feature testing, Staging (stage/pre-prod) for integration testing and production-like testing, Production (prod) serving real users. Some organizations add: QA environment for quality assurance testing, UAT (User Acceptance Testing) for business validation, Canary environment for progressive rollouts.
Environment characteristics: Dev (frequent deployments, may be unstable, lower resources), Staging (production-like, realistic data volumes, full integration testing), Production (high availability, monitoring, backups, security). Environment parity: staging should mirror production (infrastructure, configuration, data volumes) to catch production issues early.
Deployment flow: commit → CI tests → deploy dev → integration tests → deploy staging → acceptance tests → deploy production. Benefits: risk reduction (catch issues before production), testing isolation (don't impact users), confidence building (progressive validation). Understanding environment management enables safe deployment progression.
