Core Practice Content: Environment Control

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Core Practice Content: Environment Control #279

Closed bjennings-rise8 closed 3 weeks ago

bjennings-rise8 commented 3 months ago

Be sure to cover topics of:

Containerization
Environment parity
Infrastructure as Code
Configuration in the Environment

Acceptance Criteria: Explain what the core practice is Explain why its important Explain it in a way that every Riser can understand it Have a google doc that is reviewed & ready to publish Bonus: Publish it yourself on the delivery site.

Template

Resources:

Some info on Feature Flags around slide 60 in Pathway: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1w8dVzbpgyeI9jwkwGgFzvfhoN7epVTnI/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=110657374635985452331&rtpof=true&sd=true
Platform Engineering playbook: https://engineering.rise8.us/platform-engineering/methodologies/general-best-practices/

bjennings-rise8 commented 2 months ago

Schuyler offered to pick this one up!

bjennings-rise8 commented 2 months ago

Renamed "Feature Flagging" to "Configuration in the Environment" as a more general practice

derekadombek commented 2 months ago

Renamed "Feature Flagging" to "Configuration in the Environment" as a more general practice

I was actually kind of wondering what we meant by "Configuration in the Environment".. Because that could mean a variety of things around deploying software, for example you could have app dependencies and networking configs, that could be completely separate from feature flags. Feature Flags are a way to turn on or off(boolean) a single component after the app is already deployed in prod or any environment to help prevent the amount of bugs to the user while testing in prod. So I am def a fan of naming this back to Feature Fags or unless we don't want it to actually be about Feature Flags.

bjennings-rise8 commented 2 months ago

I can't remember who exactly suggested including that but my assumption of what they meant was a practice of configuring things at the environment level (eg, I set an environment variable or some configuration to my database URL in the environment rather than in application code) leading to greater security and separation of concerns around what the environment controls vs what the application code has. App code reads from the environment to connect to things like services, bring in authentication keys, (possibly use feature flags) etc

Is some of that spelled out in some of the 12-factor principles? Been a min since I was an engineer but I think there may be some good stuff in the 12 factor principles we can pull from