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xyzzy123yesterday at 8:31 PM3 repliesview on HN

Many places have "dev", "test" "prod"... but IMHO you need "sandpit" as well.

From an ops point of view as orgs get big enough, dev wraps around to being prod-like... in the sense that it has the property that there's going to be a lot of annoyed people whose time you're wasting if you break things.

You can take the approach of having more guard rails and controls to stop people breaking things but personally I prefer the "sandpit" approach, where you have accounts / environments where anything goes. Like, if anyone is allowed to complain it's broken, it's not sandpit anymore. That makes them an ok place to let agents loose for "whole system" work.

I see tools like this as a sort of alternative / workaround.


Replies

raw_anon_1111yesterday at 11:43 PM

Account vending machines where every dev can spin up thier own account is a thing and still under the control of some type of guardrails.

thenewnewguyyesterday at 9:01 PM

Sandpit should be a personal (often local, if possible) dev environment. The reason people get mad about dev being broken for long periods of time is that they cannot use dev to test their changes if your code (that they depend on) is broken in dev for long periods of time.

show 1 reply
lijokyesterday at 10:42 PM

There’s no sandpit, only prod and dev, and you’re not allowed to break prod. Your developers work in partitions of prod. Dev is used for DR and other infra testing.