In a standard business environment, a production system is one that must be up and stable, and cannot be changed without a lot of forethought and a lot of getting people to coordinate and okay the process. A development system is one that the administrators use to prepare for bringing systems into production.
However, if your users are developers, then things may be different – especially if you are also using the software in a stable environment.
Development, by its nature, produces unstable code which is prone to crashes and other undesirable behavior. This stands the usual system administration goals on their head: your systems, though they are in “production” (that is, they are used by normal users on a daily basis) – these “production” systems behave like test systems in that they are not reliable. With reliability issues, it may seem as if they are not production systems – but they are.
What’s more, there may be actual “production” systems – systems with the same software which is not being developed, but being used. These systems then, are also systems that should not change (in production, we would say), but do not have reliability problems.
Even though the development environment may feel like a test lab at times, with systems going experiencing hangs and so forth, these systems still need to be treated like a normal production system. Never forget that your users, even though they seem to do “bad” things to the system, still rely on the system being there on a daily basis.
It also means that you will have to respond to problems faster, and be proactive in preventing problems – and that you will have more problems to resolve.
In short, the normal software development environment is more challenging to the admins that support this environment – but also more exciting.
UNIX Administratosphere 