I hear Google is a fairly successful company so I think this is a limitation of your imagination. In your defense, I have argued this with very intelligent peop

I hear Google is a fairly successful company so I think this is a limitation of your imagination. In your defense, I have argued this with very intelligent people who share the same limitation. At some point, creating a second copy of prod is infeasible or becomes so expensive that one must revisit and discard assumptions about what is actually possible. Duplicating a small to medium set of micro services with a bunch of SaaS integrations isn’t typically a big deal. Much can be done by leveraging a cloud provider’s flexible capacity. At some point that stops working, e.g. when you are the cloud provider. AWS isn’t outsourcing reliability to GCP or vice versa. Other comments have already mentioned outages driven by differences between prod and staging/testing/etc — those issues only get worse at scale.