I recently got a question from a customer who was struggling with the ‘availability’ of their sub-production environments. The situation brought into focus a fundamental disconnect between the Ops folks who were trying to maintain a solid set of QA environments for the Dev team and what the Dev teams needed. To a large extend this is a classic DevOps dilemma, but the question provides an excellent teaching moment. Classic application or system availability as defined for a production situation does not really apply to Dev or multi-level Test environments.

Look at it this way. End user productivity associated with a production environment is based upon the “availability” of the application. Development and Test productivity is based upon the ability to view chagnes to the application in a representative (pre-production) environment. In other words the availability of the _changer_ in pre-production is more valuable to Dev productivity than any specific pre-production instance of the application environment. Those application environment instances are, in fact, disposable by definition.

Disposability of a running application environment is a bit jarring to Ops folks when they see a group of users (developers and testers in this case) needing the system. Everything in Ops tools and doctrine is oriented toward making sure that an application environment gets set up and STAYS that way. That focus on keeping things static is exactly the point to which DevOps is a reaction.  Knowing that does not make it easy to make the mental shift, of course.  Once made, however, it is precisely why tools that facilitate rapidly provisioning environments are frequently the earliest arrivals when most organizations seek to adopt DevOps.