Production environment
The live systems that run the real business, kept separate from the development and test environments where changes are tried first.
Also written production, PROD, test environment, development environment, UAT, pre-production
Production is where the real work happens: real customers, real money, real data. Everything else exists to protect it. Changes are built in development, tested in one or more test environments, and only then promoted to production.
Typical environments are development, where programmers build and test their own changes; system test, where changes are tested together; user acceptance testing, UAT, where the business checks the result; sometimes pre-production, set up as close to production as possible; and production itself.
On the mainframe, environments are often separated by LPAR, so production runs on its own systems. They are also separated by names, such as different high-level qualifiers for test and production datasets, and by security, so most people can read production but very few can change it.
Test environments usually hold copies of production data with personal details masked or made up. "Never test in production" is the rule, and the separation of environments is how a site makes sure it is followed.
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- LPARA logical partition: one physical mainframe carved into several independent virtual machines, each running its own operating system.
- Change controlThe process every change goes through before reaching production: reviewed, approved, scheduled and reversible.
- Source code managerA tool that stores mainframe source code, tracks every version, and moves changes through test stages to production in a controlled way.
- High-level qualifierThe first part of a dataset name, which usually identifies the owner and drives how security and storage rules apply.
- Naming standardsThe site's rules for how datasets, jobs, programs and other things are named, which security and automation rely on.