The Chicken or the Egg - Creating a Stable Preproduction Environment as a Public Cloud Provider

Learn how to build and maintain a stable pre-production environment as a public cloud provider in this conference talk from SREcon25 EMEA. Discover the technical challenges and solutions involved in creating "Testcloud," a full-featured replica of production infrastructure at Akamai. Explore the operational complexities of building isolated ecosystems, including evaluating and adapting existing industry examples, achieving parity with production environments, partitioning production from lower environments, and managing circular dependencies. Gain insights into the unique challenges faced by SRE teams when supporting infrastructure that requires validating an increasingly wide array of components and services. Understand how to safely test changes before shipping to production while managing customer expectations, making this presentation valuable for anyone involved in testing software code or physical components in complex distributed systems.