Standardize on use of “staging” for non-production application environment

  • Status: accepted

  • Deciders: @rlskoeser, @kayiwa, @acozine

  • Date: 2024-02-23

Context and Problem Statement

CDH applications and playbooks have been inconsistent in terminology referring to our non-production deploy environment, variously referring to it as “test”, “QA”, or “staging”.

PUL uses “staging” to refer to their equivalent environment, and CDH applications in testing or pre-production deploy environments make use of PUL staging resources including Postgresql and Solr servers.

This name change is related to work in PR #188, which consolidates existing playbooks to a single playbook per application with a variable to distinguish between staging and production runtime environments. This change aligns CDH and PUL naming conventions and will hopefully avoid confusion in future.

Considered Options

  1. Continue using existing “qa” environment for CDH applications and “staging” for PUL

  2. Rename CDH environment to “staging” for consistency with PUL

Decision Outcome

Option 2, for consistency and to avoid confusion between different terms that mean the same thing.

Positive Consequences

  • Staging terminology will be consistent between CDH and PUL

  • The new runtime_env configuration used in the consolidated playbooks can be used in playbooks and roles that formerly relied on the presence or absence of a qa variable

Negative Consequences

  • This change requires cleanup in playbooks, host groups, group variables

  • Some legacy items may still reference qa/test nomenclature, including: