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To be any use staging environments should be scientific tests. They should prove that a given change, if it goes to production, will work. You cannot do this i
by jen20 1y ago
To be any use staging environments should be scientific tests. They should prove that a given change, if it goes to production, will work.
You cannot do this if you're changing more than that one thing. The only way to make this work really is either dynamic environments that completely mirror everything, which tends to be time consuming or expensive or continuous delivery to a production-like environment via feature flags and so forth.
Having a staging server that is a mirror of production[1] improves things a bit over doing nothing. You need the entire environment, including all your dependencies, to have a real test of anything, and that includes things that corporate IT departments typically hate.
[1]: Why is it so common to see "PROD" written as if it were an acronym?
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI always write it that way maybe for the same reason others do it, to emphasize how critical PROD is, so you don't overlook it if you just read prod, or production. If you see PRODUCTION you might slow down and go "oh crap" so it is definitely an emphasis I always add when talking about production in text. PROD is just shorter to write, but all caps makes the emphasis stick. If you staging environment is pointing to the exact same databases PROD is, and other similar dependencies, there's no reason you can't hotswap it with PROD itself, I mean I've done something like this before. It's much easier if your production deployment pipeline is setup for it though. You'd want to scale down drastically for staging, but in my eyes, if you're not going to have staging be as carbon copy of PROD as you humanely can have it, you might as well not have that fourth environment and just suffer when you cannot reproduce bugs. The real gem of staging is that if it would break in PROD, it would definitely break in staging. In the few companies where we had a carbon copy of PROD setup as a staging environment where key things are pulled from PROD itself, we've had way less bugs promoted to PROD when QA tests them in staging. In theory the ROI is worth it, if you care about quality. Sadly most places do not care about quality nearly enough.
- teddyh 1y agoBut it makes the text look like it was written by a schizophrenic: <https://web.archive.org/web/20231122160401/https://prestersperspective.blogspot.com/p/schizophrenia-randomly-capitalized-words.html https://web.archive.org/web/20231122160401/https://prestersp...>
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI guess, but its consistently the same word being capitalized.