[toast0]

> I think it's too much to expect staging to match the load and access patterns of your prod system.

For a lot of things, this makes staging useless, or worse. When production falls over, but it worked in staging, then staging gave unwarranted confidence. When you push to production without staging, you know there's danger.

That said, for changes that don't affect stability (which can sometimes be hard to tell), staging can be useful. And I don't disagree with a staging environment for your usecases.

[sumedh]

> For a lot of things, this makes staging useless, or worse.

That depends on what Staging is used for, if its used to run e2e tests, giving a demo to PMs etc, you can use Staging. For performance testing you can setup a similar env like Prod, run your perf tests and then kill the perf env or you can scale up the staging env, dont let anyone use it except for performance and then scale it down.