Setting Up Multi-Environment Infrastructure: Dev, Staging, and Production

Calendar February 22, 2026
Infrastructure
Intermediate
Environment-Management, Infrastructure-as-Code, Deployment-Promotion, Secret-Management
Multi-Environment, Terraform, Kustomize, Secrets, Pipeline, Observability, Dev-Staging-Prod
Terraform, Kustomize, Kubectl, Vault, Helm, Github-Actions

Setting Up Multi-Environment Infrastructure: Dev, Staging, and Production#

Running a single environment is straightforward. Running three that drift apart silently is where teams lose weeks debugging “it works in dev.” This operational sequence walks through setting up dev, staging, and production environments that stay consistent where it matters and diverge only where intended.

Phase 1 – Environment Strategy#

Step 1: Define Environments#

Each environment serves a distinct purpose:

  • Dev: Rapid iteration. Developers deploy frequently, break things, and recover quickly. Data is disposable. Resources are minimal.
  • Staging: Production mirror. Same Kubernetes version, same network policies, same resource quotas. External services point to staging endpoints. Used for integration testing and pre-release validation.
  • Production: Real users, real data. Changes go through approval gates. Monitoring is comprehensive and alerting reaches on-call engineers.

Step 2: Isolation Model#

Decision point: Separate clusters per environment versus namespaces in a shared cluster.