Infrastructure as Code, 3rd Edition

Chapter 12. Designing Environments

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The concept of an environment is so pervasive in the IT industry that, paradoxically, it’s not very well defined. From an Infrastructure as Code viewpoint, an environment is a logical grouping of deployed infrastructure. Different organizations may group their infrastructure into environments based on different concerns. A common one is application instances that integrate together to provide a service. In this case, you could have multiple “production” environments, each serving a different customer or region.

Some organizations group services into different environments even when they integrate with one another. For example, one environment might host a production customer-facing service, while another environment provides back-end services like logistics, or operational services like monitoring. Quite often, each environment has a common set of policies and access permissions, which is a ...