[stingraycharles]

I found that Kubernetes + minikube (or a variant of that) is a fairly straightforward way to handle this. Teams / developers can easily set up a local testing environment, product owners can QA that way, etcetera.

This of course depends on your level of lock-in with various cloud environments.

[pm90]

IaC tools often handle more than kubernetes, but agreed that k8s is a fantastic way to get reproducible behavior which is absolutely imperative for testing.

This is kinda why I love Google Cloud and don't see myself moving to another cloud provider until they match GKE. I want all developers to throw everything into GKE, and Operations manages only the VPC's, firewalls etc. Developers get complete ownership over compute (and networking within the cluster) while broader network management can still be managed by an operations team.

[mverwijs]

Yup - that works pretty well. And gives developers some insight into what is required to get stuff working.

It does assume no hardware or complex networking needs to be handled.

And there is the point of observability. When there is a proper testing ground for developers that is as-production, it enables developers to dig into and mess with logging, tracing, debugging of all sorts.

This adds value by providing developers insight into what a reliability engineer (or whatever they call sysadmins these days) needs to provide whatever service it is that the developers' code is part of.