Why would I need more production environments, anyway?

The traditional dev/staging/production environment model is a staple of web application development. But as an organization grows, it becomes increasingly likely that they will outgrow this model. Whether for technical or business reasons, there will often be a point at which a singular production environment will need to be split into several, each with their own requirements and rules for deployment.

This post will focus on production environments, but the need for a split can also emerge in dev or staging environments. That may be a topic for a future post!

Reasons for multiple production environments

There can be many reasons for adding a new production environment, some more compelling than others. Since adding environments can often be such a big undertaking, it stands to reason that you'll wait until the need is undeniable.

I've seen a number of these reasons first-hand, and a few more that I've heard about during conversation with other engineering leaders in different organizations.

High availability or disaster recovery

In today's always-on world, system outages can have devastating impacts on business operations and customer trust. Many organizations implement multiple production environments to protect against failures caused by datacenter-wide outages or network issues.

This may follow an active-active pattern, where traffic is distributed across multiple environments at once, or active-passive setups, where standby environments can rapidly take over if the primary environment fails. This failover may be a manual process, fully automated, or somewhere in between, with an automated failover process that can only be triggered by a human.

In an active-active setup, redundant copies of apps and resources could be considered part of a single logical environment. The big cloud providers can make this easier by abstracting away replication across availability zones.

Geographic points of presence

For applications serving a global user base, a single centralized environment often results in unacceptable latency for far-away users. Deploying multiple production environments in strategic geographic locations can dramatically reduce API response times and improve user experience.

While third-party CDNs can mitigate some of these issues for static content, dynamic content and search functionality often require regional compute resources. Your CDN provider may provide edge computing for these purposes, but you need to get your code to these edges, so you've just effectively created a new environment!

These distributed environments are frequently read-only replicas, as supporting write operations introduces complex consistency challenges that can offset the latency benefits you're trying to achieve.

Single-tenant architectures

Some organizations, particularly those serving enterprise customers with strict security or compliance requirements, may implement dedicated environments for individual customers. This approach provides strong isolation that can be essential for customers in regulated industries or those handling particularly sensitive data.

However, this comes with significant implementation costs in both infrastructure and operational complexity. As a result, single-tenant environments are typically limited to premium enterprise customers who are prepared to pay extra for this added peace-of-mind.

Data sovereignty and regulatory compliance

The regulatory landscape for data protection continues to evolve rapidly. Many organizations now require separate production environments to ensure compliance with data residency requirements in specific countries or regions.

European regulations like GDPR have driven much of this trend, but they don't hold a monopoly on these requirements. Beyond general data protection, specific industries such as healthcare or defense may require completely isolated environments to meet regulatory obligations. Government clients, in particular, often require dedicated environments with specialized security controls - plenty of folks in compliance have their horror stories of long projects to meet FedRAMP requirements.

Environment-wide blue-green deployments

Some organizations extend the concept of blue-green deployments beyond individual services to encompass entire environments. This approach can be invaluable during large-scale migration efforts or architectural overhauls, allowing teams to work safely in a complete copy of the production environment before redirecting traffic once the riskiest work is complete.

In the extreme, this can also subsume the role of the staging environment, with staging and production environments switching roles as changes in staging are validated.

Team ownership

As the org chart expands, there will be more and more teams working on an ever broadening range of projects.

A frequent challenge when operating in the cloud is cost management, and depending on how the budgets are split, it may make sense to provide different teams or departments with entirely separate cloud accounts.

You could also find that the diverse needs of your teams require access to several different cloud providers to take advantage of their unique features and capabilities.

When splitting environments based on org structure, the divisions may be enough to totally isolate these environments, which can actually simplify your pipelines. However, services may need to communicate across these environment boundaries, which introduces a different kind of complexity - managing networks and permissions.

Challenges of expanding your environment footprint

Even if you have a compelling reason to expand your environment footprint, it will still likely be a daunting task! This is particularly true when you're attempting to replicate a production setup that grew organically over time. Such environments often harbor unexpected dependencies and manual configurations that aren't captured in code.

I've worked with teams who discovered, only after attempting to create a new production region, that critical parts of their infrastructure relied on undocumented manual steps or region-specific assumptions. What seemed like a straightforward replication exercise turned into months of archaeological work to uncover and codify these hidden dependencies. And every time we found an undocumented dependency, we'd become more fearful that we'd missed another elsewhere. This led to an extremely cautious approach, slowing the whole process.

How Ocuroot can help

Ocuroot was designed specifically to address the growing complexity of managing multiple environments at scale. The platform provides a simple, consistent way to create and manage environments regardless of their purpose or configuration.

By making environments a key first-class concept, Ocuroot significantly reduces the time, effort, and costs associated with adding new environments to your infrastructure. You can take control of the dependencies throughout all levels of your application stack, so replicating an existing environment can be as simple as adding a single line of code!

Ocuroot also provides flexible governance around deployment rules for each environment, enabling you to enforce appropriate controls while maintaining velocity. Whether you're creating development sandboxes, compliance-focused environments, or global points of presence, Ocuroot gives you the tools to manage them consistently.

Ready to see how Ocuroot can simplify your environment management? Book a demo to learn more.