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Sandboxes

Setting up a sandbox environment has normally been a trivial task. Set up a vhost, get a copy of the database, build out the app, and start doing stuff. When ‘Stuff’ is ‘Done’ push the changes onto production, and bask in your own crapulence. That is, until your data set exceeds the limits of the sandbox, and the SOA which is saving the day in production is becoming nothing but a headache in development.

The basic sandbox environment for an app includes a reasonably recent data set, similar ( underpowered can be OK, depending ) hardware, the exact same versions of php, mysql and apache. Php, mysql and apache need to be configured exactly the same way as in production. In fact, as part of this process, it might be useful to pull down those ever so important configuration files, put them in a safe place. Perhaps source control (cough). Consistent configuration is extremely important. Bugs produced by configuration problems are notoriously hard to reproduce, and result in devs combing through code looking for bugs that don’t exist.

Maintaining a few sandboxes should be a trivial endeavor. That is, until your project gets too big. A natural response to handling ever-growing problems is use a Service Oriented Architecture; that is, to shard off aspects of the app and dedicate hardware and resources to it. However, three or four shards later, multiplied by an environment for each developer, the guy who was doing sys admin work as needed just became full timer. Unfortunately, there’s no way around this, even with a clever sys admin, who can leave enough automated scripts around so that developers can mostly maintain their own environment.

The fact of the matter is maintaining the development environment is one of the most important things a company can do. Close attention to detail in the sandbox will make all the difference in the deployment process. Changes in code base, file permissions and configuration can all be tested and deployed the same as in production. So every build to every sandbox (everyone builds daily, right?) is a chance for the development team to catch mistakes, and learn from them, before the big push. And if that fails, we all know how to handle a crisis.

Published Feb 21, 2010

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