Managing different environments like Development, Staging, and Production.
In a professional software development workflow, code progresses through a series of environments before it reaches end-users. Each environment serves a distinct purpose. The 'Development' environment is typically the developer's local machine or a shared cloud-based environment where new features are actively built and unit tested. The 'Staging' (or QA/Pre-production) environment is designed to be a mirror of the production environment. Its purpose is to provide a safe place to run comprehensive tests, such as integration testing, end-to-end testing, and performance testing, on the complete, integrated application. This is where you verify that the new code works correctly with all other services and infrastructure before it goes live. The 'Production' environment is the live system that is accessed by end-users. It is the most critical environment, and deployments to it must be handled with extreme care. A CI/CD pipeline automates the promotion of code through these environments. For example, a successful build and test run on a feature branch might trigger an automatic deployment to a shared development environment. Merging a pull request into the main branch could trigger a deployment to staging. Finally, a manual approval or a successful run in staging could trigger the deployment to production. This structured progression ensures that code is thoroughly vetted at each stage, minimizing the risk of introducing bugs to the live system.