Development, Staging and Production Enviromnemts on the Azure Cloud

Question

I need three environments for an application I'm working on, a development environment where the latest version of the code is(built on every commit) and the testing happens(we merge the dev and testing environment for efficiency). And we have a staging environment, this one is used for the product demos and presentations, and the production environment with live data and customers.

Now how this would map to the Azure Cloud Services, I read in many blogs that I shouldn't be using the built-in staging/production slot for that. Should I create three separate cloud services with three separate linked databases, is this the best practice?

Answer 1

I would suggest either three separate Cloud Services, or even 3 subscriptions. The benefit with the different subscriptions is (a) you can control/restrict access to only those that should have access, and (b) provides an easy way to view costs for each environment (since billing is done at the subscription level).