While we're preparing our development environment, it's a good time to talk about planning our platform environments (in an on-premises or IaaS system, we may say server environments). These environments are used to host our system during the different phases of their life cycle between development and production (or live).

The scales of a business and budget are the major factors in this decision process; if we have a large business and a large system, it might take a number of testers to test the changes made to a system and do full regression tests when needed. If the budget for a system is tight, it may not be possible to have a perfect set of environments, so compromises may have to be made. We also need to remember that we're not just talking about a single website; we need to include databases, table storage, worker roles, Service Bus queues and topics, and so on. We'll look at different types of environments and examples of environment sets for different...