To reduce bugs and outages in a production environment and create room for load testing, what environment setup is recommended?

Setting up a separate development environment for writing code and a test environment specifically designated for configurations and load testing is the recommended approach to reduce bugs and outages in a production environment. This configuration allows for a clear separation of concerns, where developers can focus solely on code development in the development environment without the risk of impacting the production system.

By maintaining a dedicated test environment, organizations can conduct rigorous load testing without risking the stability and performance of the live application. This ensures that any potential issues identified during testing can be addressed before code is deployed to production, ultimately leading to a more reliable and robust software product. Furthermore, this separation facilitates proper environment management, enabling teams to implement a specific set of configurations and deploy changes in a controlled manner.

In contrast, allowing load testing in the production environment could lead to performance degradation or outages, as the production workloads may not handle additional stress without affecting user experience. Creating a smaller development environment is beneficial but doesn't specifically address the need for load testing. Limiting access to the production environment is important for security but does not directly contribute to reducing bugs and improving the testing process.