Although most of us intuitively understand what a production environment is, it is worthwhile clarifying what it really means. A production environment is simply one where end users use your application. It should be available, resilient, secure, responsive, and must have abundant capacity for current (and future) needs.

Unlike a development environment, the chance of real business damage due to any issues in a production environment is high. Hence, before moving to production, the code is moved to various testing and acceptance environments in order to get rid of as many bugs as possible. For easy traceability, every change made to the production environment must be tracked, documented, and made accessible to everyone in the team.

As an upshot, there must be no development performed directly on the production environment. In fact, there is no need to install development tools, such as a compiler or debugger, in production. The presence of any unneeded software increases the attack surface of your site and could pose a security risk.

Most web applications are deployed on sites with extremely low downtime, for example, large data centers are at five nines, that is, 99.999 percent, uptime. By designing for failure, even if an internal component fails, there is enough redundancy to prevent the entire system crashing. This concept of avoiding a single point of failure (SPOF) can be applied at every level, hardware or software.

Hence, it is a crucial collection of software you choose to run in your production environment.