You have to automate the production environment in the same way that you automate the development environment. Today, it is common to find companies using cloud providers to deploy their systems and API-driven tools to provide servers.

Installing an OS and adding the dependencies needed to make an application work is something that must be automated. If you want to provide many servers, you just have to execute the same script several times. Technologies such as Docker, Puppet, and Chef can help you to do this. An indirect benefit of using code to provide environments is that you'll have the perfect documentation for all the required dependencies to make an application work. Over time, these scripts can be improved. They are stored in version control systems, which makes it easy to track every single change made to them. We will look at this further in Chapter 11, DevOps and Release Management.