How to use different environments to develop fintech tools

One of the main concerns in any startup is to find a path that works for the technological tools we offer to meet their goals. At kiban, after more than a decade of experimenting, testing and learning, we have found a path that works for our team and, above all, for our clients.

When you develop tools it is necessary to have replicas of systems, called environments, in which we can test what we are creating. In a production environment, for example, an application is deployed, which is a set of servers and databases that communicate. However, if we want to make a change, we cannot test it directly in the production environment: in such a case, we need to duplicate that environment, which implies using the same number of servers and databases, but with another version of the application. In this space we add the new code we want to test and, if everything goes well, we copy this code to the set of production servers.

First steps: Develop and test

Many companies start with only one test environment and one production environment because having more environments also implies high costs. In kiban cloud, however, we look for a way that allows us to offer the best to our customers with the lowest possible margin of error. That is why we work with four environments.

We call our first environment "development". As the name suggests, this is a space created especially for our IT team to upload their new code or test that what they are doing works.

We have a second environment, which is the "testing or QA" environment. Even though our development team may have initially tested that their code works, when it comes to testing, the test team may notice bugs that others missed. When we decide to make a new release, we take some features created in the development environment, put them in QA and test it for two weeks without making any changes. If any fixes need to be made, we make them and test until we don't detect any problems for some time. When this happens, the version in QA is considered stable and then we make a new release to our third environment, which we call "production".

Always ready to correct

In kiban cloud, in addition to the above, we have a fourth environment, called "hotfix". This was created to address bugs detected by customers without compromising the production environment. This environment is a production replica in which we follow exactly the sequence of steps that the customer described to us to replicate the problem and be able to make a hotfix. In this case we cannot wait the usual cycle of several weeks to release the change: so in this environment we modify the code that has the production version, update the hotfix and then test that it works. If it does, we send it to production as soon as possible.

Although it takes a lot of work and investment for our team to maintain four environments, at kiban cloud we decided to do it this way because we want our cloud tools to have the highest quality and respond in the best way to our customers. Today we have found that by following this path we can offer secure and stable fintech tools with the ability to respond immediately to any unexpected situation.

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