---
title: 'Establish Foundation for Development Environments'
menuTitle: '3. Foundation for Development'
disableToc: true
weight: 30
---

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Copyright Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.
SPDX-License-Identifier: CC-BY-SA-4.0
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After you've set up your base foundation, you have the option to set up the foundation for team development environments. 

## Value of development environments

This section of the guide helps you establish an initial foundation in support of a set of development environments. If you mainly focus on integrating commercial off the shelf (COTS) software products and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings, you might not have "development teams" in the traditional sense.  However, you will still benefit from establishing development environments in AWS.

Setting up development environments in AWS helps your builders experiment with and perform early testing of migration and application and data integration solutions in flexible and safe environments that are isolated from your more formally controlled test and production environments.

Compared to the cost and complexity of setting up and maintaining development environments in physical data centers, establishing virtual development environments in AWS is relatively low-cost and straightforward.

As your use of the cloud matures, your builders are encouraged to begin using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to gain the benefits of greater automation. Adoption of IaC practices means that at least some of your traditional infrastructure teams will evolve to become builder teams in their own right.

## Deferring set up of team development environments

You're encouraged to set up your initial team development environments at this time. If you'd like to defer setting up development environments, you can skip forward to [Establishing Foundation for Test and Production Environments]({{< relref "04-test-prod" >}}). Later, you can come back to this section and set up your team development environments.

## Establishing team development environments

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