Environment as a Service (EaaS): A Comprehensive Guide

Companies are creating more and more applications and services as they continue to embrace digital transformation and automation. In fact, the average enterprise now runs 464 custom applications, according to a recent report. Even small organizations with fewer than 1,000 employees maintain around 22 custom applications on average.

As a result, businesses are looking for ways to make software development faster, easier, more cost-effective, and more collaborative. To do this, many organizations are turning to on-demand environment as a service (EaaS) models. In fact, EaaS is increasingly helping engineering teams produce software at scale.

It’s a good idea to have a working knowledge of EaaS heading into 2023. Keep reading for a complete guide to EaaS, including how it works, the benefits that it offers, and how to deploy it in your organization.

What Is Environment as a Service?

EaaS is a cloud-based delivery model that streamlines the way developers create and deploy environments. The concept is an extension of infrastructure as a service (IaaS). But while IaaS only involves hardware and basic software, EaaS encompasses much more—like settings and code, as well as the underlying software and infrastructure that’s necessary for operating in an isolated environment.

An environment in this case refers to the infrastructure, software, and platform services that engineers need to complete different tasks. Software engineers today use live production environments as well as nonproduction environments for things like development, staging, and testing.

On one hand, environments are a necessary part of software production. However, they're expensive and time-consuming to provision, deploy, configure, and decommission. High demand often leads to bottlenecks and delays, preventing teams from shipping software quickly.

By providing all necessary components in one central portal, EaaS eliminates the burden of having to manually create and manage software environments.

What do Developers use EaaS for?

Engineering teams are finding more and more ways to use EaaS, with new use cases constantly arising. With that in mind, let’s examine three common examples of how you can use EaaS in your organization.

Performance Testing

Software performance testing is more important than ever due to skyrocketing customer expectations and rising competition. In fact, demand for QA engineers and software testers is on pace to grow by 25% over the next decade.

Businesses are now using EaaS to enable performance testing at scale while keeping costs low and ensuring accuracy.

Businesses need to ensure maximum performance and stability while sharing sales demos, especially when selling mission-critical software or products with speed and reliability guarantees.

By using EaaS, companies are able to avoid sharing system resources with other users and programs, thus providing a more stable and predictable operating experience.

Migrations

Businesses often need to transfer data between storage systems and cloud environments. However, this can be dangerous without the right tools and resources.

EaaS enables stable, flexible, and risk-free storage during a migration project. EaaS environments are also fast and easy to manage and decommission, which can eliminate security violations and data leaks after a migration is complete.

Top Benefits of EaaS

There are numerous benefits to adding EaaS to your business’s software engineering toolkit.

1. Improve Software Velocity

Software production teams are under rising pressure to improve velocity and deliver more updates and applications. To this end, velocity remains one of the top KPIs heading into 2023.

EaaS increases software velocity by decreasing rework and removing bottlenecks during production. This is due to the fact that EaaS provides the resources to support staging and QA initiatives.

2. Save Money

Companies are also under pressure to reduce production costs and maintain lean development environments. According to Gartner, cutting costs by optimizing IT is among the top technology trends for 2023.

EaaS is very cost-efficient. It reduces maintenance costs and enables businesses to use resources more effectively. At the same time, EaaS lowers project cycle times, leading to further cost savings.

3. Increase Flexibility for Developers

Most organizations are looking for ways to enable remote work in order to attract and retain talent. In light of this, another benefit to EaaS is that it increases flexibility for developers. Participants can access and modify environments from any location instead of having to be on-site.

4. Free Teams to Focus on Other Work

At the end of the day, engineers need to be focused on high-value work, not spending time creating and managing environments. EaaS removes the burden of having to create environments, thus freeing team members to tackle the most important tasks.

Are There Drawbacks to EaaS?

Unless your business has strict rules in place requiring on-site development tools and resources, then you shouldn't have any issues implementing EaaS. The technology is secure, flexible, and noninvasive, as it doesn’t require purchasing or managing any infrastructure. You can also use it alongside local developer resources.

Truth be told, it’s riskier to disregard EaaS when considering the numerous benefits that it offers. EaaS positions companies to develop software at a faster clip without sacrificing quality or performance.

Continuing to produce software without isolated, on-demand environments could present a major disadvantage as more and more competitors adopt flexible EaaS models that enable them to accelerate production.

Implementing EaaS: Build or Buy?

Some companies choose to build their own EaaS platforms. However, this is extremely time- and cost-intensive, and most companies lack the bandwidth to ensure optimal results. For example, some organizations are now dealing with outdated internal EaaS systems and are struggling to retrofit their platforms for Kubernetes.

Ultimately, EaaS systems are very complicated to implement, manage, and maintain. It’s much easier to work with a third-party EaaS provider that can ensure a smooth transition and future-proof your platform for long-term success.

Best Practices for Implementing EaaS

Deciding to work with a third-party EaaS provider can save your business a significant amount of time and effort. However, there are a few things to keep in mind when implementing a solution.

Consult With Your Stakeholders

Before you move forward with EaaS, it’s a good idea to bring your team up to speed about why you're making the change. During this strategy session, you can explain how EaaS works, the benefits that it offers, and how it will improve speed and productivity.

Prioritize Security

When browsing for a provider, it’s important to select one that features enterprise-grade security and authentication features. You should also ask for a bill of materials and analyze the company’s supply chain to explore where any open-source components come from.

This is critical if your team intends to use EaaS to store sensitive data. After all, not all vendors offer the same commitment to security.

Consider the User Experience

Your engineers are going to spend a significant amount of time on the EaaS platform. As a result, it’s a good idea to factor in the user experience.

You may also want to invite engineers to demo platforms and participate in the sourcing process. Otherwise, developers may turn to other tools for testing software, which could lead to shadow IT and create privacy and security issues.

Streamline Development With ReleaseHub’s On-Demand Environments

As you can see, there are numerous advantages to using an on-demand EaaS model, like cost savings, faster time to market, and fewer production errors.

ReleaseHub offers a purpose-built EaaS platform that lets you instantly spin up environments for testing, production, demoing, and more. It’s ideal for businesses of all sizes—from small startups to large enterprises and everything in between.

To experience how ReleaseHub can change the way your team produces software, try a demo today.

Many companies are turning to environment as a service (EaaS) solutions to turbocharge software production. Learn all about EaaS in our latest blog.