[aussiedude]

If userdata is whats failing you in staging there's simple ways to go about pulling in a sanitised version of prod data to making it more prod like.

We had some issues with Akamai WAF blocking things in PROD which only got caught when pushing to PROD so we added staging to Akamai now its closer to 1:1!

For example oracle e-business suite runs completely different with 900GB of prod data vs 100gb of staging data.

ASP.Net applications are slower talking to databases with 1600gb of MSSQL data in prod vs 40gb in staging vs 3gb in test etc.

DR performance different again because its scaled down version of PROD but has the same amount of data and traffic loads when it takes full production load.

Blog writer is taking the piss.

[_y5hn]

Due to privacy and GDPR laws, this is bad practice and outlawed in many parts of the world. We used to mirror from production, but you can't really do that with user data without exposing some personal information. Even a timestamp from a transaction can be enough to identify a real person.