Runtime environment

The runtime environment refers to your test environment as well as your production environment where you deploy your custom code and serve your site.

Production environment

A production environment refers to your production site that is open to your customer, shoppers, or user access. If you have a for-profit business then this is your revenue-generating site.

Staging and authoring environments

A staging environment allows the site administrators to update the data and test the changes, and then propagate the change to the production server. This is useful for testing updates to the product catalog, but it is also important for testing new shopping process commands.

Test and stress environments

In addition to the staging environment, as discussed above, many sites, especially large sites, may have decided to have one or more test environments to test or experiment a variety of updates or scenarios.

An environment for stress testing your system should mimic your production environment closely. If the stress environment does not mimic your production environment closely then you need to figure a correlation between the results of your performance test cases and how those results translate to the impact on the performance of your production site, as discussed in Chapter 6, WebSphere Application Server High Availability.

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