My experience with their list of suppositions:
> Pre-live environments are never at parity with production
My experience is that is is fairly trivial to have feature parity with production. Whatever you do for production, just do it again for staging. That's what it is meant to be.
> Most companies are not prepared to pay for a staging environment identical to production
Au contraire. All companies I've been to are more than willing to pay this. And secondly, it is pennies compared to production environment costs, because it isn't expected to handle any significant load. And, the article does mention being able to handle load as being one of the things that differ. I have not yet found the need to use changes to staging to verify load scaling capabilities.
> There’s always a queue
I don't undestand this paraph at all. It seems like an artificial problem created by how they handle repository changes, and has little to do with the purpose of a staging environment. It smells fishy to have local changes rely on a staging environment. The infrastructure I set up had a development environment be spun up and used for a development testing pipeline. Doesn't, and shouldn't need to rely on staging.
> Releases are too large
Well... one of the main benefits of having a staging environment is to safely do frequent small deployments. So this just seems like the exact wrong conclusion.
> Poor ownership of changes
This again, is not at all how I understand code should be shipped to a staging environment. "I’ve seen people merge, and then forget that their changes are on staging". What does this even mean? Surely, staging is only ever something that is deployed to from the latest release branch, which also surely comes from a main/master? The following "and now there are multiple sets of changes waiting to be released", also suggest some fundamental misunderstanding. *Releases* are what are meant to end up in staging. should be *a* release.
> People mistakenly let process replace accountability
> "By utilising a pre-production environment, you’re creating a situation where developers often merge code and “throw it over the fence"
Again. Staging environment isn't a place where you dump your shit. "Staging" is a place where releases are verified in an as much-as-possible-the-same-environment-as-production. So, again. This seems like entirely missing the point.
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It seems to me that they don't use a staging environment, because they don't understand what such a thing should be used for. I'd be completely OK with someone rationalizing this as "too much of a hassle". But to try and justify something so poorly...
From their conclusion:
> Dropping your staging environment in favour of true continuous integration and deployment can create a different mindset for shipping software. When there is no buffer for changes before they go live, you need to be confident that your changes are fit for production. You also need to be alert and take full ownership of any changes you make.
Well... of course there is a shift in mindset when you'll be shitting your pants every time you make a change in production, since that's when you'll get to see if you broke something. The whole point of a staging environment is to have a buffer.... so that you don't have to be "confident". So that you don't have to be on high alert, because you have alerts that can trigger without anything important going offline. So that ownership isn't crucial in a post-fuck-up blame game.