[oelmekki]

Yes, maybe I should have been more explicit, sorry.

I'm now using dedicated servers, so staging is quite straightforward. But before that, I was in a company which had two heroku applications tied together through api, and a dedicated aws for optical processing (also tied through api).

Having two apps was mainly a memory concern with heroku dynos and the third on aws was to install custom software, so we had three applications where we would probably had a single on dedicated machines.

Anyway, the pain in that was we had to replicate the exact same relation between all staging apps, mirroring production apps (so, two heroku apps and one on dedicated server).

I can imagine that such app specialization is something we will see more and more, thus the harder task it may imply in staging env setting.

[ubermuda]

The great thing is that emerging (or established actually) technologies and APIs now permit to modelize complex apps topologies and duplicate them at will (I'm thinking VMs and containers here), so the pain you describe is just one automation away ;)