[DL.LD.1] Establish development environments for local development
Category: FOUNDATIONAL
Create development environments that provide individual developers with a safe space to test changes and receive immediate feedback without impacting others on the team or shared environments. Development environments are small scale, production-like environments that provide a balance between providing developers with accurate feedback and being low cost and easy to manage. Development environments serve a different purpose than sandbox environments and should be used for day-to-day development and experimentation that requires access to your software components and services.
Development environments can take the form of dedicated cloud environments, local emulations of infrastructure, or be hosted on a local workstation. While most cloud providers, open-source tools, and third parties provide options for emulating infrastructure locally on development machines, these tools might not have full feature parity, leaving them to only be suitable for a subset of use cases. Using cloud-based development environments provides the most reliable, accurate, and complete coverage when working with cloud workloads. We recommend providing a cloud-based development environment to each developer, with each environment being in a separate AWS account.
Developers should be encouraged to use their own development environments for testing and debugging to reduce the chance of problems occurring in environments shared by the broader team. To keep the development environment as close to the production setup as possible, deployments to the development environment should be sourced from the main releasable branch, rather than from long-lived development branches. The development environment setup should be well-documented in an up-to-date playbook that is readily available to all members of the team. For this to be effective, the playbook must be updated as the needs of the team and environment change over time. Ideally, the full lifecycle of these environments, including provisioning, are managed through automated governance processes.
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