[nickelpro]

The article doesn't talk about any of that though. The article says staging diffs prod because of:

> different hardware, configurations, and software versions

The hardware might be hard or expensive to get an exact match for in staging (but also, your stack shouldn't be hyper fragile to hardware changes). The latter two are totally solvable problems

[Gigachad]

With modern cloud computing and containerization, it feels like it has never been easier to get this right. Start up exactly the same container/config you use for production on the same cloud service. It should run acceptably similar to the real thing. Real problem is the lack of users/usage.

[lamontcg]

I was responding to other commentors not really the title article.

The stuff you cite there is pretty simple to deal with, configuration management is basically a solved problem and IDK how you can't just fix the different hardware.

The more universal problem of making preprod look just like prod so that you have 100% confidence in a rollout without any of the testing-in-prod patterns (feature flags, smoke tests, odd/even rollouts, etc) is not very solvable though.

[relaxing]

A lot of things seem like they shouldn’t be, until you’ve debugged a weird kernel bug or driver issue that causes the kind of one-off flakiness that becomes a huge issue at scale.