Test environments and staging

1) Purpose and area of responsibility

Test environments reduce the risk of releases by giving quick feedback and near-production conditions without impacting real players and money. For iGaming, this is critical due to payments (PSP), KYC/AML, responsible play (RG), and seasonal peaks.

2) Environment taxonomy

Dev (local/sandboxes): quick iterations of developers, minimal dependencies, ficheflags.
CI/Test (integration): assembly, unit/integration, contract tests, e2e on mocs.

Staging (pre-prod): maximum parity with sales (versions, configs, topology), "release rehearsal."

Perf/Load: isolated environment for load/stress tests so as not to interfere with functional checks.
Sec/Compliance Sandboxes: security checks, RG/PII policies, SoD.
DR/Failover Lab: accident scenarios and interregional failover.

Each environment has its own namespaces by: 'tenant/region/environment'.

3) Parity with sale (staging-first)

Configurations: GitOps, same circuits and validators; differences - only in values (keys/limits/endpoints).
Topology: same service versions, network policies, balancers, cache/database types.
Data: synthetic or obfuscated; no "raw" PIIs.
Telemetry: identical dashboards/alerts (only threshold levels and rate limits are different).

4) Data: Strategies and hygiene

Synthetic generators: realistic distributions for deposits/rates/CCS, pseudo-BINs, false documents.
Obfuscation of copies: one-way hashing of identifiers, CIPHER masking of sensitive fields.
Sitting: "scenario sets" (registratsiya→depozit→stavka→settl→vyvod) with deterministic IDs.
TTL and cleaning policies: auto-purging old data, volume limits.
Replay traffic (shadow): read without entries/side effects.

5) Service virtualization and external providers

PSP/KYC/CDN/WAF emulate contract mokes and variable responses (success, soft/hard decline, timeouts).
Contract tests (consumer-driven): fixing interfaces and examples.
Test doubles are switched by the flag: 'real' sandbox 'virtualized'.

6) Isolation and multi-tenancy

Namespace per tenant/region in k8s/config stores.
CPU/IO/Net quotas and limits so that one test does not crash the entire environment.
Ephemeral stands on the PR/feature branch: rise in minutes, live for hours/days, then disposed of.

7) CI/CD pipeline and gates

Поток: `build → unit → contract → integration → e2e (virtualized) → security scan → staging → canary → prod`.

• green unit/contract, linters of circuits and configs;
• risk class of changes (policy-as-code), freeze windows;
• SLO gates staging (no red SLIs).

• successful "release rehearsal" (migrations, configs, phicheflags, alerts);
• post-monitoring checklist;
• 4-eyes signatures on high-risk (PSP routing, RG limits, PII export).

8) Release rehearsals (staging drills)

DB/schema migrations: dry-run + reversibility (down migrations), time estimation.
Config release: canary steps, auto-rollback by SLI.
Ficheflags: inclusion on 5-25% of audience, guardrails check.
Status page/comm templates: processing messages (drafts without publishing outside).
Incident bot: bot commands to launch runbook actions as a training alarm.

9) Non-functional checks

Load/stress/endurance: profiles of real peaks (matches, tournaments), goals p95/p99, protection against overheating of queues.
Fault tolerance (chaos): network failures, drop replicas, timeouts of providers, partial feilover.
Security: DAST/SAST/IAST, secret scan, SoD check, authorization/audit regressions.
Compliance: KYC/AML/RG scenarios, export of reports to regulators, geo-boundaries of data.
Finance: correctness of the ledger in fractional/marginal cases, idempotency of payments/settles.

10) Observability of environments

The same SLI/SLO cards and alerts (levels are softer).
Synthetics repeats user paths: login, deposit, rate, output.
Exemplars/trace are available for RCA; logs without PII.
Drift detector: Git ↔ runtime (versions, configs, phicheflags).
Cost metrics: $/hour of environment, $/test, "heavy" dashboards.

11) Access, SoD and Security

RBAC/ABAC: access by role/tenant/region; production secrets are not available.
JIT rights for administration operations, mandatory audit.
Data policy: PII ban, obfuscation, geo-residency.
Network isolation: staging cannot write to external production systems.

12) Performance and cost (FinOps)

Ephemeral stands → auto-recycling; night shedulers turn off idle clusters.
Base layer sharing (Observability, CI cache), but test load isolation.
Catalog of "expensive" tests; concurrency limits; prioritization by QoS class.

13) Integrations (operational)

Incident bot: '/staging promote 'rollback', '/drill start ', rehearsal timelines.
Release-gates: release block with red SLO staging.
Feature-flags: general flag solution service, its own traffic segment.
Metrics API: same endpoints and metric directories, "medium badge" in responses.

14) Examples of artifacts

14. 1 Ephemeral Environment Manifesto on PR

yaml apiVersion: env. platform/v1 kind: EphemeralEnv metadata:
pr: 4217 tenant: brandA region: EU spec:
services: [api, payments, kyc, games]
dataSeed: "scenario:deposit-bet-withdraw"
virtualProviders: [psp, kyc]
ttl: "72h"
resources:
qos: B limits: { cpu: "8", memory: "16Gi" }

14. 2 Provider Directory (Virtualization)

yaml apiVersion: test. platform/v1 kind: ProviderMock metadata:
id: "psp. sandbox. v2"
spec:
scenarios:
- name: success rate: 0. 85
- name: soft_decline rate: 0. 1
- name: timeout rate: 0. 05 latency:
p95: "600ms"
p99: "1. 5s"

14. 3 Checklist "Release Rehearsal" (squeeze)

DB migrations: time, reversibility;

configs/ficheflags: diff, canary, SLO gates;

alerts/dashboards: tied, no flapping;

status drafts: ready;

reverse plan: 'T + 5m', 'T + 20m' metrics.

15) RACI and processes

Env Owner (SRE/Platform): parity, access, cost, dashboards.
Domain Owners: test scenarios, seating, contracts, KPI.
QA/SEC/Compliance: checks, reports, RG control.
Release Manager: gates, calendar, freeze/maintenance.
On-call/IC: participate in rehearsals of P1 scenarios.

16) KPI/KRI environments

Lead Time to Staging: kommit→staging, median.
Change Failure Rate (per staging): share of rollbacks to prod.
Parity Score: version/config/topology match (target ≥95%).
Test Coverage e2e by critical paths: login/deposit/rate/withdrawal.
Cost per Test / per Env Hour.
Drift Incidents: Git↔runtime discrepancies.
Security/Compliance Defects: found before Prod.

17) Implementation Roadmap (6-10 weeks)

Ned. 1-2: inventory of environments, GitOps catalog, configuration diagrams, basic data sets, provider contract tests.
Ned. 3-4: staging parity (versions/topology), ephemeral PR stands, PSP/KYC service virtualization, SLO gates.
Ned. 5-6: release rehearsals (checklists, bot teams), load profiles, chaos sets, environment dashboards.
Ned. 7-8: data policy (obfuscation/TTL), SoD/RBAC, FinOps shadowing, cost reports.
Ned. 9-10: DR/feiler-lab, compliance scripts, WORM audit, team training.

18) Antipatterns

Staging ≠ prod - other versions/configs/network rules.
Copying prod-PII into test → regulatory risks.
No virtualization of external providers → unstable/expensive tests.
Lack of SLO gates/rehearsals → surprises in the sale.
"Eternal" test data without TTL → garbage and false effects.
Joint load and functional checks in one stand.
Zero disposal at night/weekend → incineration of budget.

Total

Test environments and staging are a production quality infrastructure: parity with sales, clean data and virtual providers, strict CI/CD gates, release rehearsals, observability and FinOps. This framework reduces CFR and MTTR, increases release predictability, and protects iGaming platform revenue and compliance.