Why it's critical to get environment promotion right

Environment promotion is a crucial process in software development that involves promoting an application through various stages, such as development, pre-production, and production, to ensure its stability and readiness for user deployment. This process is tightly linked to Continuous Delivery (CD), which automates the promotion steps to enhance deployment frequency and quality. While environment promotion can initially be straightforward, it becomes challenging at scale due to the need to manage numerous applications, environments, and compliance requirements. Kubernetes, a popular platform for managing containerized applications, introduces additional complexities due to its declarative nature and the need to manage both cluster and application configurations together. Tools like Helm, Kustomize, Argo CD, and Flux CD, as well as dedicated CD tools such as Octopus Deploy, can help automate and streamline environment promotion, making it more manageable even as the scale and complexity increase. These tools facilitate configuration management and deployment automation, ultimately enabling more frequent and reliable software releases.