1) 0 non-production + production
2) 1 non-production + production
3) 2 non-production + production
4) 3 non-production + production
5) N non-production + production
6) Something entirely different.
I was thinking about branch based environments or per developer environments but was not sure how to depict that in a simple poll. Feel free to chat amongst yourselves.
Staging - Continuous deployment; whenever code is checked into the main branch, it automatically goes here
QA - Once/twice a week we "cut" a release from what's in staging and promote it to QA. Our testers go through all of the changes and make sure that nothing is broken. We also have more rigorous integration tests running against this environment.
Production - After everything is vetted in QA, it gets promoted again to production.
I've seen some places have this take two weeks (in Agile terms, once a sprint). I've seen others do it basically every day (which IMO is too often). Once a week is the sweet spot for me.
The front-end team get branch based deployments. The backend has their local docker development.
Try as we might, creating all the infra even with 100% terraform is a challenge - mostly for the swallowing of the AWS bill.
We just could not see the cost/reward for doing more than just non-prod + prod.
Totally open to ideas why 2 non-prods is better than 1.
One of those Non Prod projects is usually a replica of Production, unless it is cost prohibitive.