Jake Stauch says Serval's key design principle is to apply software-development-life-cycle practices to automation, including separate development, staging, and production environments, gates, and isolated branches.

“I think the biggest one is the software development life cycle, something that we take for granted in engineering context of the, "Hey, there's actually like a dev environment, and then there's staging, and then there's prod, and there's like these gates between them, and maybe you've got, you know, branches that people can develop on that's not gonna harm the other systems."”