Deploy across environment tiers

Many organizations use separate development, staging, and production environments to maintain the quality of their websites. When used in your ArcGIS Enterprise organization, those environments are often set up as follows:

• Development—This is a sandbox environment, where you can test your applications and services without impacting your development environment. Typically, the development environment is disconnected from the production ArcGIS Enterprise environment. Once changes are validated on the development environment, they are applied to the staging environment.

• Staging—This environment is a clone or other approximation of the production environment. A staging environment is used to build and test applications and map caches; conduct user acceptance, performance, and load testing of other third-party software; stage new commercial data updates; and conduct training activities. Testing at this level results in a decision to apply the changes on the production environment, or reject the changes and wait for a new iteration from the development environment. The staging site is not used for development; it is only used for performance and functional testing. Esri provides staging licenses for ArcGIS Enterprise at a lower cost than production licenses.

• Production—No development or testing occurs on this environment, given that GIS users (and, in some cases, the public) access it. Only changes that have passed the scrutiny of testing on the staging site are applied to the production site.

The development, staging, and production environments ideally use different databases and infrastructures. Each organization has its own rules for how changes are tested and approved across the environments.

See the ArcGIS Architecture Center Environment isolation topic for more information.