The DevOps Handbook

9Create the Foundations of Our Deployment Pipeline

In order to create fast and reliable flow from Dev to Ops, we must ensure that we always use production-like environments at every stage of the value stream. Furthermore, these environments must be created in an automated manner, ideally on demand from scripts and configuration information stored in version control, and entirely self-serviced, without any manual work required from Operations. Our goal is to ensure that we can re-create the entire production environment based on what’s in version control.

All too often, the only time we discover how our applications perform in anything resembling a production-like environment is during production deployment—far too late to correct problems without ...