Establish and Document the Application's IT Operating Environments and Instances

This chapter explains how to establish and document the IT Operating Environments in which an Application runs, and the Application Instances deployed in each.

Establish the Application’s IT Operating Environments and Instances

During design, determine which IT Operating Environments the Application needs across its lifecycle, for example development, Systems Integration Testing, User Acceptance Testing, Training, Pre-Production Staging, Production, and Disaster Recovery, using the enterprise’s standard environment types. For each, determine how many Application Instances will exist and why, for example one per region or one per customer group, and which IT Operating Environment Instance each will be deployed to.

Ensure that the environments chosen match the SDLC Paths the Application’s Releases will follow, so that each Release can be built, tested, and staged in an appropriate environment before reaching Production.

Document and Share the Environments and Instances

In the Application Documentation, record each IT Operating Environment the Application uses and each Application Instance, together with the IT Operating Environment Instance it runs in and the Release it is currently running. Update the Release running in each Instance with every Deployment. The chapters in the subsection “Application Instances and Environments” describe how to name Instances and how to document the ways in which they differ.

Best Practice: Establish and Document the Application’s IT Operating Environments and Instances

It is a best practice to both establish and document the solution for where an Application runs: determine the environments and Instances it needs, record each Instance with its environment and current Release, and update that record with every Deployment.

Benefits: A current list of environments and Instances tells engineers where to test, operators where to look, and security teams where to apply fixes. Recording the Release running in each Instance makes it immediately clear whether a fix has reached Production, and exposes Instances that have fallen behind.

Connections to Related IF4IT Practices and Inventories

The IT Operating Environments Best Practices describes environment types, Environment Instances, and their governance. The Systems Development Lifecycle (SDLC) Best Practices describes which SDLC phases correspond to IT Operating Environments.