Environments

As we looked at the Zoning and 3 tier architectures, a point to remember and understand is that all these Zones are nothing but an Interface on a firewall where we have setup security policies as to which traffic is allowed to-and-fro. Similar to the concept of Zoning using the firewall we create multiple environments which are nothing but zones or separate Vlans created on the firewall, i.e. Our good old firewall would have multiple zones on multiple interfaces on which you have setup security policies, using this same concept on Zones you may create Sections or compartments for your application or database servers and place them in different environments, as far as the text goes I have tried my best to explain a zone or an Environment but this cannot be understood unless you look at the diagram and read the text once again

So, what are the common types of Environments which we have in any Enterprises and what is their use case, the most common ones are:

• Dev

• UAT

• Prod

Dev (Development): This environment is basically used for Developing an Application, this is the place where you have all your IDEs and Studios in which you input code and create packages, this is the same thing when we talked about in the application section about developers doing coding, this is the zone where developers connect and do the coding, so remember that a Dev environment is a place where Software is actually developed and minimal amount of testing is done such as unit testing, unit testing is nothing but the method testing or a functionality testing which the developer does on its own to check the code from a functional perspective

Some organisations do create another zone called SIT (System Integration Testing) which is similar to Dev but here the internal testing team gets involved to check the functionality

UAT (User Acceptance Testing): This is the environment which is built before the production environment so that the Business users who actually want to use the environment would have a taste of it, I mean test it, using dummy data and check whether all functionalities are there as per their expectation and whether they are working correctly or not. Once the Business users signs off (gives approval) that the application is as per their requirement in UAT then only the application would be deployed in Production

Production: I guess I don’t need to explain this but this is the environment where your applications are actually running live for the customers, users or employees depending upon the nature of the requirement. Every live application all over the world is running live only on a production environment

Circling back to the concepts of Zoning or creating such sections in the Network (Dev, UAT & Prod) the most important aspect to remember here is security as there are certain principles which you need to watch out for, for e.g. you can never allow connections from UAT to Production or allow transfer of data from UAT/Dev to Prod as it may result in serious non-compliance (something which your Auditor may not like)

Although the ones mentioned above are standard Environments which you would find in almost every organization but there can be more Environments depending upon your organizational IT requirements such as Preprod, Staging, Migration, etc.