[QuinnyPig]

On paper? Awesome!

In practice? The rubber-meets-the-road challenges are not insignificant. Everything that aspires to set up environments like this seems to find itself dashed upon the rocks of "oh, that particular third party API is the same in prod as it is in pre-prod," "stateful datasets that need to be independent of other environments but also purged of sensitive content," and a bunch of unknown unknowns that exist in a given production environment despite everyone's best efforts.

I've got an AWS application that I'd love to to build preprod environments for (not in Kubernetes) and despite controlling all of the dependencies myself, I still have an eternal backlog item hanging over my head to go through and abstract all the environment-specific stuff out. In other words, "the heavy lifting isn't in the part that I understand your service to do." :-/

Man, do I wish it were otherwise.