Environments

Environments represent different risk levels and audiences: preview, development, staging, production, and sometimes regional or tenant-specific spaces. Good delivery keeps configuration explicit while making promotion traceable.

| Environment | Typical purpose | |-------------|-----------------| | Preview | Per-PR disposable review | | Staging | Pre-production integration | | Production | Real users and data |

Configuration should be versioned (env files, IaC, platform settings) and reviewed like code. Promotion paths should show which artifact version reached which environment.

On interviews: environment parity limits, seed data strategy, migration ordering across environments, approval gates, and why staging still differs from production.

Common pitfalls: assuming perfect parity is free; untracked config drift between environments; preview environments sharing production databases.

The trade-off is fidelity to production versus cost, speed, and operational complexity of extra environments.

Checklist:

• Define purpose per environment.
• Version configuration changes.
• Keep promotion path visible in tooling.
• Isolate preview data and credentials.