There’s a wonderful and detailed article on Environments Management up on CM Crossroads this month by Subhendu Mohapatra of Bearing Point. It’s a very good look at the importance of planning and maintaining your non-production environments.

Subhendu points out the proliferation of environments and I believe the problem is even understated. While we may have environments for various types of tests for a particular project, the environment count can multiple when we have parallel development and multiple branches which all need to be tested concurrently. This problem is especially accute in the lower environments. We even encounter customers who describe 6-10 active development lines a single project, but only 3 early QA environments. The more imminent changes get to be functionally tested, everyone else waits. It’s an ugly bottleneck.

It’s also one we’re working on. For an overview of our upcoming environment provisioning tool, check out uProvision on our website.

update: We thought uCloud was a bit too vague, and renamed the product to uProvision.