IT Operating Environments Best Practices

Overview

A common and expensive infrastructure governance failure is provisioning lower environments at or near Production scale without considering whether that scale is justified by the validation activities those environments support. A DEV environment provisioned with Production-equivalent compute, memory, and storage is consuming infrastructure cost that is disproportionate to the volume and nature of the development and unit testing activities it supports. The scale of lower environment infrastructure should be determined by the realistic demands of the activities performed in that environment, not by the convenient shortcut of replicating Production infrastructure specifications across all environment tiers.

Best Practice

Establish right-sizing guidelines for each environment tier that define the infrastructure scale appropriate to the activities and user populations of that tier, and require that new environment provisioning requests justify requested infrastructure scale against those guidelines. RSC and DEV environments should be provisioned at the minimum scale needed to support individual or small-team development and testing activities - typically a fraction of Production scale. SIT environments should be sized to support concurrent integration testing by the number of teams that will use the environment simultaneously, with sufficient headroom for the data volumes and traffic patterns that integration testing generates - significantly larger than DEV but typically still well below Production scale. UAT environments should be sized to support the user population conducting acceptance testing with realistic data volumes - closer to Production scale than SIT but rarely requiring full Production-equivalent infrastructure. PSTG should approach Production scale most closely because its validation value depends on its fidelity to Production infrastructure conditions. Production infrastructure scale is determined by the production workload requirements of the solutions it supports.

Benefit(s)

Right-sized environment infrastructure reduces the infrastructure cost of maintaining the full environment pipeline to the level that the validation and development activities performed in each tier actually require. Lower environment infrastructure cost savings are immediate and persistent - a DEV environment operating at ten percent of Production scale costs approximately ten percent of Production infrastructure per unit of time. At enterprise scale, where dozens or hundreds of environment instances operate concurrently, the aggregate savings from systematic right-sizing consistently represent a significant percentage of total infrastructure spend. The freed infrastructure budget can be redirected to Production reliability improvements, PSTG fidelity investments, or DR capability development that produces higher organizational value than over-provisioned lower environment infrastructure.