Synapse implementation success methodology: Evaluate solution development environment design

Solution development and the environment within which it's performed is key to the success of your project. Regardless of your selected project methodology (like waterfall, Agile, or Scrum), you should set up multiple environments to support development, testing, and production. You should also define clear processes for promoting changes between environments.

Setting up a modern data warehouse environment for both production and pre-production use can be complex. Keep in mind that one of the key design decisions is automation. Automation helps increase productivity while minimizing the risk of errors. Further, your environments should support future agile development, including the addition of new workloads, like data science or real-time. During the design review, produce a solution development environment design that will support your solution not only for the current project but also for ongoing support and development of your solution.

Solution development environment design 

The environment design should include the production environment, which hosts the production solution, and at least one non-production environment. Most environments contain two non-production environments: one for development and another for testing, Quality Assurance (QA), and User Acceptance Testing (UAT). Typically, environments are hosted in separate Azure subscriptions. Consider creating a production subscription, and a non-production subscription. This separation will provide a clear security boundary and delineation between production and non-production.

Ideally, you should establish three environments.

• Development: The environment within which your data and analytics solutions are built. Determine whether to provide sandboxes for developers. Sandboxes can allow developers to make and test their changes in isolation, while a shared development environment will host integrated changes from the entire development team.
• Test/QA/UAT: The production-like environment for testing deployments prior to their release to production.
• Production: The final production environment.

Next steps

In the next article in the Azure Synapse success by design series, learn how to evaluate your team of skilled resources that will implement your Azure Synapse solution.