"Even our development instances are done using basically the same ansible setup as production (it catches more than I'd expect in terms of "that would have hurt

"Even our development instances are done using basically the same ansible setup as production (it catches more than I'd expect in terms of "that would have hurt in production")." At the risk of a glib comment, the essence of your statement would be VERY high up on my "biggest lessons I've learned over the last decade" list, if such a thing existed. The benefits of having your develop look as close as naturally possible to your production (and then abusing it in every way imaginable as one tends to during dev) has caught so much on my end.