[DL.ADS.1] Test deployments in pre-production environments

Category: FOUNDATIONAL

Progressively validate software changes across multiple environments, including development (alpha) and testing (beta) before deploying into production. Additional staging environments can be introduced as needed, such as staging (gamma). These additional environments help to prevent the introduction of bugs in production environments, validates backwards compatibility, and increases the confidence in the quality of the deployment.

Each non-production deployment serves as a gate, only allowing changes to progress to the next stage after they pass all validations. Early issue detection and isolation prevent propagation to later stages or production. A controlled deployment process includes strategies to manage risk and support rollback if issues are identified during these test deployments.

One-box testing can be used to test backward compatibility to ensure new code changes coexist with and function properly with the existing code base. One-box refers to the testing of changes in a single unit of deployment, such as a single container or instance, which is configured to use production endpoints. This form of testing can be used to help ensure the changes interact efficiently with production endpoints of other services. This can be done by creating a dedicated staging environment for cross-service backward compatibility (zeta) testing. Services deployed to the zeta stage interact exclusively with production endpoints to identify potential integration issues before the code reaches the production stage.

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