[benjanik]

I know we're mentioning the $100k number, but I'm genuinely curious: how do you spend $100k on staging? I currently spend $75k/year on production, $3k/year on staging, and around $2k/year for a full cloud environment per developer that wants one. For me, $100k for staging would mean >200k monthly active users on staging.

[true_religion]

You want staging to be as close to production as possible, but obviously not exactly he same size.

If you spend 1M on production, you might have a staging environment 1/10th of that size. Say 10 machines in a cluster instead of 100. But some technologies also have minimum implementation cost requirements per tier of usage. Like if you have a multiple data centers in production, you will need to test that in staging. You can’t just have 1 machine in a cluster, so your staging environment needs at least 3 to make a quorum. Therefore, to have 5 data centers in staging, you now need 15 machines... which is more than the base of 1/10th of production.

Issues like that can balloon staging costs if you try to properly implement it.

[fastball]

Honestly with the right architecture you shouldn't even need 10 machines in a cluster, 2 should do. After all, the whole point of clusters/load-balancing etc. is that 2 machines behind your LB should function the same as 1000 machines behind your LB, just the latter gives you a lot more throughput.

[LoSboccacc]

it depends however whether you want to test the code or the infrastructure

my preproduction uses a three machines setup so it can catch clustering problems, but the code itself can run just as well on a single machine interacting with a local single instance db, and devs run it like that.

[polycaster]

Not every system scales along the monthly active users axis.

[zedgerman]

Depends on the business you’re in. Sometimes an “environment” is a rack (or 2) of servers and that might be 100k-400k/rack before space & power & bandwidth.