Back in the old days, we had very strong development to production demarcation rules, and this was very simple, because there was very little integration. In fact, usually the only time that we had blurred lines was the use of email, where if you got a test email wrong, it would escape into the world and cause never ending troubles.
Then along came the cloud. The cloud comes with its ability to spin up multiple instances of the same type of environment to apparently make the lines between Dev and all other environments very clear cut.
But inside a corporation, you’ll find that this is not the case, because underneath all of your nice, neat environments there is the same infrastructure with the same shared services, so you soon find out that when you request something, what you think is a simple and limited development environment request will actually mean weeks of justification and the full change release process.
The most common of these is firewalls. If you want to open a firewall between you and another environment, such as a vendor service. That is actually a change to a production area and will be treated as such. You will find this will be true of most network situations, and particularly with most data transfers to things in the cloud, which will even for simple proof of concepts require sign off by your security services. So if you are planning that, do not assume that a request for dev access will be instantly acted on, you will have to do the same justifications, as if you were dealing with production.
