The Nukemblog
“We have a problem in production! does it reproduce in staging?” is a sentence often uttered in many companies. Underlying this simple sentence lie implicit assumptions about environments which often turn out to be false in our modern services and applications. Clusters and micro-services complicate matters and make production environments hard to reproduce and model, but when A/B tests, feature toggles and ephemeral containers, serverless functions and multi-tenancy are introduced one must conclude we no longer have a “production environment”, but rather “production environments”, plural. In a sense, every transaction experiences a unique unreproducible universe. In this world, what is the value of Staging environments? how does such understanding change our development processes?