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Test environment strategy

Environment contention would throttle agent-speed builds across two geographies — so environments are ephemeral, parity-controlled, and self-seeding.

The rules​

  • Ephemeral per-PR environments — every PR gets a real environment to run e2e against (CI/CD standard), torn down after.
  • Parity rules — lower environments match production in the ways that matter (config, versions, topology); 12-factor parity.
  • Automated seeding — from the synthetic datasets, so a fresh environment is usable immediately.

Why ephemeral​

Shared long-lived test environments become bottlenecks and drift from production. At RAPID speed, with squads in the UK and India both shipping, a queue for "the test environment" would cap throughput. Ephemeral per-PR environments remove the queue entirely.

Standards referenced: 12-factor (dev/prod parity).