[ww520]

You can't reproduce a dev/staging environment with the same traffic pattern, user behavior, and request load as to a production environment. Google bots won't crawl your dev/staging environment and you won't know its impact until you see it. DDOS attack won't happen in your dev/staging environment. Click fault won't happen on dev/staging.

Developers probably shouldn't have root privilege on production but they need to have read access at the very least. They also should have write and deployment privilege on a few production machines for testing and experiment. Whatever mess they made there should be counted under acceptable loss.

[jefe78]

No disrespect, but after a statement like this, "...deployment privilege on a few production machines for testing and experiment.", I wouldn't let you near my servers. That's not what a production server is for.