What is a staging environment?
Options
- The laptop of the developer who writes the code
- A copy of production used to test changes before going live (Correct option)
- The production database that real users use
- A backup server that takes over after a failure
Answer
A copy of production, as similar as possible, where changes are tested before going live
Why
Typical environments: development (your machine), staging (production-like, for final checks) and production (real users).
Testing in staging catches problems with real configuration, infrastructure and data volumes that don't appear locally.
The closer staging is to production, the more useful it is.
Remember
Staging = rehearsal before production.