That's not how I read it, I think this actually makes a lot of sense. In a regular (non-cloud) deployment, there are unavoidable differences between the stagin

That's not how I read it, I think this actually makes a lot of sense. In a regular (non-cloud) deployment, there are unavoidable differences between the staging and real production configurations. No one can afford to double their hardware costs for the sake of uber-realistic load testing results. So people usually opt to create a closely matched staging environment where testing is performed. Every once in a while something slips by that's only reproducible on production, and you're stuck debugging a critical and hard to reproduce bug. Not the best combination. With cloud computing, you're supposed to have lots of redundant computing capacity. So it's trivial to test in an environment that's identical to production by just asking for more processing power for the purposes of testing. As an added bonus you also have the distributed resources to generate considerable parallel load, which also helps. That last part like you said is not that hard. But that's only the icing. The cake is being able to test on a 1-1 replica of production. That's precious.