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How do we manage environment refreshes?

What is an environment? And why does it need to be refreshed?

An environment is a term used to describe the different instances of the same software product, each of them with their own codebase and independent infastructure.

Mediagenix On-Demand use three environments, i.e. staging, preproduction, and production. The staging and preproduction environments are used for testing, the production environment is the one that clients use in their day to day operations.

The contents of each environment look very similar because the staging and preproduction environments are refreshed regulary with a copy of the production environment. After all, the testing performed in the staging and preproduction environments is meant to be as fully representative as possible of the production environment.

How will I know when an environment refresh will happen?

The staging and preproduction environments are refreshed in January, April, July, and October.

The Mediagenix On-Demand infrastructure team agree on a date for the environment refreshes which is then communicated to clients at least one month in advance; a reminder is also sent the week before the refresh takes place.

The dates will usually be a Tuesday at 09:30 GMT/BST for staging and a Thursday of the same week at 09:30 GMT/BST for preproduction.

What do I need to do?

After the environment refresh:

  • The content of the environment (staging or preproduction) will match that of production.
  • User accounts that were specific to staging or preproduction will need to be recreated.
  • Snitch will start processing events belonging to the new refreshed data. Unprocessed events belonging to the old data will be ignored in Staging and Preproduction environments.
  • Snitch configuration from Production will be replicated in Staging and Preproduction.
  • SNS topics and SQS queues are unaffected: all integrations must purge unprocessed messages to avoid any errors.

How will I know once the refresh has completed?

An email confirmation is sent once the environment refresh has successfully completed.

What if I have questions about this?

If you have any questions, your Technical Account Manager will be happy to help!