I just started working in a software company and they have 4 different deployment environments. Reference / Integration / Acceptance / Production.
Could someon please explain to me what the typical usecases of these single environments are? Production is clear to me but the others not really. Especially the difference between Reference and Integration. I already googled it but couldn't find it out.
In software deployment, an environment or tier is a computer system in which a computer program or software component is deployed and executed. In simple cases, such as developing and immediately executing a program on the same machine, there may be a single environment, but in industrial use the development environment (where changes are originally made) and production environment (what end users use) are separated; often with several stages in between. This structured release management process allows phased deployment (rollout), testing/Acceptance , and rollback in case of problems.
Environments may vary significantly in size: the development environment is typically an individual developer's workstation, while the production environment may be a network of many geographically distributed machines in data centers, or virtual machines in cloud computing.
