Tilma is hosted across multiple "environments". A specific Tilma site or "instance", can exist in any one of these environments. Customers may choose to have their instance live in any one of the various environments. The environments map to the phases of our product development lifecycle. Work goes through each phase (and environment) sequentially, as the work moves through phases customers at the earlier stages get faster access but take on more stability risk.
When a customer chooses to move their Tilma instance from one environment to another, they are choosing to accept greater risk with features that haven't been field-tested as long or they are choosing to reduce risk and potentially lose access to certain features they may currently have.
The graphic above shows the stages of the development lifecycle. Development work begins in a staging environment where it can be reviewed and iterated upon until our team identifies the work as “production ready”. Once the development phase is complete the feature launches through a series of “production” environments. Throughout each phase in the production environment the work is field-tested by more users for more time, in which the work gains stability as additional bugs and edge-cases are discovered and resolved.
Customers can choose which environment they would like their Tilma instance to live in; knowing that phases further along the lifecycle will receive access to features slower than the previous environments. If at any point a customer's risk tolerance changes, they may request to have their Tilma instance moved to another environment. Every Tilma instance is available to be accessed at a special URL within each environment. So even if your instance lives within one environment you can always “preview” it within another.
