[ldoughty]

Ops people need a Dev environment to test, especially for Infrastructure as code. With an increased connectivity between developer code and Infrastructure, I prefer my team finds out everything in a development environment that's exactly like staging and prod. That way deployment to staging is proof of the IAC change. There's less risk.

This also lets developers try out new services in the cloud without impacting the staging... (This is on top of a sandbox for research, but integration of research takes time and an environment too)