In this blog post, Alex Yates discusses the practical steps for provisioning development and test environments as part of a series on safe schema updates. He emphasizes the importance of creating rapidly deployable and disposable dev/test environments to enhance testing capabilities and reduce lead times, advocating for self-service environments that mirror production settings. Yates outlines a process that includes infrastructure as code, automated SQL Server installation, data privacy handling, and the use of database cloning to manage large datasets efficiently. He highlights the need for environments to be easy to set up and maintain, enabling developers to work without long delays or dependencies on operations teams. This approach facilitates smaller, safer, and more frequent deployments while preparing the groundwork for near-zero downtime deployment strategies and breaking up monolithic systems into more modular architectures.