Production is not the only alternative to local. Companies can set up servers, either in the cloud or on premise, specifically for development and/or staging pu

Production is not the only alternative to local. Companies can set up servers, either in the cloud or on premise, specifically for development and/or staging purposes. This is very useful if the production environment is hard to replicate on each developer's local machine. For example, a team where some people prefer the MacBook Air and others prefer beefy Windows desktops might set up a cluster of Linux servers for shared development and testing. A common alternative is to tell everyone to run a bunch of VMs/containers locally, but this isn't always feasible depending on the size and complexity of the production cluster.