We recently had the following scenario on our cloud based Appian environment.
1. We do all our application building / designing / development on our development environment.2. We promote our applications to our QC environment and finally Production.3. Our development environment recently had issues where the Appian support team had to restore it to a point from the previous day.4. Once our development environment had been restored to the previous days recovery point, we had effectively lost all our application development from the recovery point to the time the server became unstable.
Question: What is your process to avoid or mitigate this loss of work/code if your dev environment crashes ?
I come from a non-Appian environment where we develop our source code and then commit it to a source code repository.From there it automatically checks the source code for quality, builds the application, and deploys it to our development environment.If our development environment crashes for any reason and we need to restore it, we don't lose any developer productivity or source code as it is safely tucked away in our source code repository.
It is absurd to me that we lost developer productivity / source code because our Appian development environment crashed.
I would love to hear everyone's take on the above and thoughts on best practice around this within an Appian environment.
Discussion posts and replies are publicly visible
One option to protect yourself could be to run more frequent exports (i.e. noon + end of day) via the deployment API https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/23.3/Export_Package_API.html and archiving the packages somewhere.
Another option might be to have an on-prem development environment where you have a more aggressive backup strategy.
That being said, I think this is the first time I've heard of something like this happenning.