The point is not that dev and production environments are identical, but that dev staging and production environments are identical. Your dev box can have whate

The point is not that dev and production environments are identical, but that dev staging and production environments are identical. Your dev box can have whatever you like on it, but if it can't fake production behaviours, it's not going to help you catch and debug bugs in production. Of course there are limits. You could, it's perfectly valid, buy twice as much capacity in production and run it twice there. And use remote debugging tools. The point, especially with ops involved, is that your dev box is a snowflake and you want the least amount of manual configuration possible. It's not a requirement. Your app will run fine in production without it simply by testing in production. But few people willingly recommend that approach, even as pretty much everyone does it at some point or another. Even the best emulation of production won't prevent the need for debugging in production when a bug isn't caught before it gets deployed ;-)