What OSS environments do you need?

When we’re planning a new OSS, we tend to be focused on the production (PROD) environment. After all, that’s where it’s primary purpose is served, to operationalise a network asset. That is where the majority of an OSS’s value gets created.

But we also need some (roughly) equivalent environments for separate purposes. We’ll describe some of those environments below.

By default, vendors will tend to only offer licensing for a small number of database instances – usually just PROD and a development / test environment (DEV/TEST). You may not envisage that you will need more than this, but you might want to negotiate multiple / unlimited instances just in case. If nothing else, it’s worth bringing to the negotiation table even if it gets shot down because budgets are tight and / or vendor pricing is inflexible relating to extra environments.

Examples where multiple instances may be required include:

  1. Production (PROD) – as indicated above, that’s where the live network gets managed. User access and controls need to be tight here to prevent catastrophic events from happening to the OSS and/or network
  2. Disaster Recovery (DR) – depending on your high-availability (HA) model (eg cold standby, primary / redundant, active / active), you may require a DR or backup environment
  3. Sandpit (DEV / TEST) – these environments are essential for OSS operators to be able to prototype and learn freely without the risk of causing damage to production environments. There may need to be multiple versions of this environment depending on how reflective of PROD they need to be and how viable it is to take refresh / updates from PROD (aka PROD cuts). Sometimes also known as non-PROD (NP)
  4. Regression testing (REG TEST) – regression testing requires a baseline data set to continually test and compare against, flagging any variations / problems that have arisen from any change within the OSS or networks (eg new releases). This implies a need for data and applications to be shielded from the constant change occurring on other types of environments (eg DEV / TEST). In situations where testing transforms data (eg activation processes), REG TEST needs to have the ability to roll-back to the previous baseline state
  5. Training (TRAIN) – your training environments may need to be established with a repeatable set of training scenarios that also need to be re-set after each training session. This should also be separated from the constant change occurring on dev/test environments. However, due to a shortage of environments, and the relative rarity of training needed at some customers, TRAIN often ends up as another DEV or TEST environment
  6. Production Support (PROD-SUP) – this type of environment is used to prototype patches, releases or defect fixes (for defects on the PROD environment) prior to release into PROD. PROD-SUP might also be used for stress and volume testing, or SVT may require its own environment
  7. Data Migration (DATA MIG) – At times, data creation and loading needs to be prototype in a non-PROD environment. Sometimes this can be done in PROD-SUP or even a DEV / TEST environment. On other occasions it needs its own dedicated environment so as to not interrupt BAU (business as usual) activities on those other environments
  8. System Integration Testing (SIT) – OSS integrate with many other systems and often require dedicated integration testing environments
  9. STAGING is often used in a similar way to PROD-SUP (see above)
  10. PRE-PROD is the name of an environment, usually in the build / configure / test stage of the life-cycle, before it transitions to become the PROD environment (see above). A PRE-PROD environment might be used when you’re building a new parallel PROD environment that will eventually replace an existing PROD environment. It may also be getting built in readiness to become a client’s first-ever PROD OSS environment

Am I forgetting any? What other environments do you find to be essential on your OSS?

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