To separate development and production environments for software development, it is essential to create a distinct environment where new features or patches can be developed, tested, and validated before being released in the production environment. This separation provides several benefits, including preventing downtime, catching security vulnerabilities and bugs, allowing developers to test new dependencies, showcasing changes to stakeholders, and ensuring data isolation and access control. To achieve this separation, businesses must fulfill requirements such as isolation, access control, and data separation. Isolation can be achieved by running production and non-production workloads separately using different networks or resources within the same network. Access control may require a separate authentication layer for each environment, and data separation involves hosting a different data set in each environment to prevent sensitive information from being exposed. Modern software development teams often follow agile methodologies, which involve incremental enhancements, testing, and shipping changes to production. To implement separate development and production environments in Snowflake, businesses can use either one database or schema per environment or create a separate account for each environment. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, including the need for extra effort and cost when using separate accounts, but providing enhanced security and data isolation benefits when having multiple accounts. Ultimately, the best option depends on the use case and budget, with separate accounts being more suitable for limited budgets or requiring repetitive cloning operations, while one account per environment is better suited for businesses with a larger budget and strict data compliance policies.