Environments Explained

Owned by Former user (Deleted)
Last updated: Jan 27, 2020 by Frank Kays
3 min read

This document explains what each of the environments you use is and when to use them. 

Environments:

Production (PROD):

Production is your live environment that is used for your daily operations. It is visible to your customers and travel partners. It is updated as per our Release Schedule, which is roughly every 4 - 8 weeks based on the size of the release. Release dates will be communicated to you by InteliSys. It is always accessible to you.

Training (TRAIN):

Training is a stable environment used to train anyone in your organization. It is populated with a copy of your production database to mimic the information you use every day. We push the information to your Training environment when each new version release is pushed to training or whenever you request it (there is no fee for additional data refreshes within reason). Training is always accessible to you.  

API Development

This environment is best suited for long term development against our APIs.

User Acceptance Testing (UAT):

UAT is a version of what we call a “Quality Assurance” environment. This is available to you, prior to a new release to test new functionality that we have coming in. Our Quality Assurance team is given first access to all environments for testing. Once our QA team has had the opportunity to fully test the functionality, it is then released to you (to preview the upcoming release). This happens roughly 1 week prior to the scheduled release date. Within a few days after the release, UAT is moved to the Maint environment and becomes the new Maint.

Maintenance (MAINT):

MAINT is where we apply hotfixes, so that you may test them before they are released to your production environment. Maintenance is always available for you. A hotfix is any piece of functionality released outside of the release schedule - it can be a bug fix or an entire feature.

Environment Processes:

New Features:

  • A developer makes the changes in our Development Environment (which is not publicly accessible).

  • Once the Developer is happy with their changes, the changes are then released to our Quality Assurance Department.

  • When the release passes testing, we open up the UAT environment for further testing by you.
  • After a window of approximately 1 week, it is then deployed to production.
  • The UAT environment then becomes the new MAINT environment, as it is then on the up-to-date release (and will be used in the hotfix process in the next cycle).
  • Once we have finished our production deployment to all Clients, we then release it to Training.

Hotfixes:

  • Developer makes the appropriate changes in our development environment (which is not publicly accessible).

  • Once the developer is happy with their changes, they release it to our Maintenance environment, where our QA department validates that the changes function as expected.

  • We then ask you to validate the hotfix in MAINT.

  • When your validation passes, the hotfix is deployed to your PROD environment.

For large fixes, once the production deployment is complete, the hotfix is deployed to Training. (This includes anything that would really change core functionality.)
Smaller items such as small bug fixes, itinerary changes and so on are not moved immediately to Training - they are generally moved to Training in the next release cycle.

How to access environments:

Production and Training:

Amelia Production/Training Portal

Maint and UAT:

User Acceptance Testing (UAT)

Maintenance (MAINT)