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Appian Cloud Environments for my Client

rmanugarra

Can anyone tell me as to how many number of environments are ideal when we are working on an Appian project?

Currently we have - 

 

DEV  (cloud env)

TEST (cloud env)

PRODUCTION (cloud env)

We use DEV for all the appian development, test for all the testing and then move it to Production. Should we also ideally have a pre-production environment to ensure all code is first deployed on pre-prod before it is pushed to production? In what kind of projects do we have more than 3 environments?

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  • Certified Lead Developer

    I'd say that it depends on the size of the project/team/organisation.

    My personal preference is to have 4 environments for the following reasons:

    • A User Acceptance Testing/Staging environment is especially useful if you are currently working on a bigger feature with breaking changes (which would require data migration). UAT/STG allows you to develop a hotfix that you can deploy to production and then retrofit back into your DEV environment. This environment is essentially a mirror of your production environment.
    • It can also be useful for training purposes. i.e. you are actively developing and releasing new features to your Test environment but you want stable environment for training users.
  • Certified Lead Developer

    It is going to depend heavily on what you are doing on your specific project. If you have problem areas that you believe may be better served by utilizing more environments others can help provide suggestions, but every organization's needs are a little different. It will be hard to outline specifically when you should be utilizing the standard three environment setup vs expanding the environment setup without more context.

    There are a lot of Appian Cloud customers who utilize three environments and it works well for their needs from a governance and cost perspective. Other customers have much more complex program needs or governance models that require additional environments. For example: performance testing environments, hotfix environments, data migration environments, training environments, staging environments, multiple applications on different development cadences, multiple applications run by different development teams, etc.

  • Appian Employee

    A new playbook article was recently released in order to answer this question. In general we recommend you start with the standard 3 environments (Development, Test and Production) and then eventually move towards a 4 stage environment.

    The article can be found here: https://community.appian.com/w/the-appian-playbook/1846/application-deployment-guide

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