The Software Development Life Cycle presents a number of challenges to all aspects of systems development, one of which is environment management. This whitepaper presents a strategy to address concerns relating to environment consistency and availability for this key activity in the SDLC. The Pattern that is proposed in this whitepaper addresses a number of concerns that will increase efficiency in environment related changes to provide a high level of agility and promote consistency in all managed environments for a program of work.
Environment management has many facets. Primary, it involves the construction of the physical hardware, which represents all nodes in the (inter) connected system. Each node in the system can be seen to provide a service to the holistic system and, is therefore interconnected with other nodes in the system. Given that most nodes in the system have dependencies to other nodes, the entire environment can be represented as a system of interconnected, dependent nodes. This fact increases the fragility of a system and enforces a greater need on environment consistency.
A number of strategies exist that attempt to solve the consistency concern. Each one of these strategies will impose a risk onto a program and must be mitigated in the form of an environment management strategy.
This whitepaper aims to present a proven strategy to solve the problem of environment consistency management. The presentation will not detail the technologies that implement the strategy as factors such as operating system selection and technology stack will affect the selection of tools used to implement the strategy.