Acceptance environment

Once GAP components have been tested successfully in the test environment, they are advanced to the UAT environment. In this environment, stakeholders from other teams such as Network Engineering and Operations are able to perform their own tests on the system.

In the UAT environment, only full releases are deployed. This means that development builds are not included in this environment. Devices targeted by GAP are physical routers in the lab, to increase accuracy of integration testing.

The UAT environment has been designed to mimic the ultimate production environment as close as possible. To achieve this, all VMs are managed in the same manner using Puppet, and external resources are configured identically. The external service database is hosted on a distributed Postgres cluster, which is provided by the DevOps team. The Redis instance is also a cluster, which again comes from the DevOps team.

Once testing has been completed, components are ready to move to the production environment.