> Over time, your production staging and dev all become entirely heterogeneous.
I've found that this is simply the reality, excepting test-only environments. Developers need to be able to run the applications out of an IDE, compiled with special instrumentation, or whatever else they need to do. It's not possible to support every combination of what they need.
Also, there's some significant developer overhead sometimes. I had another team give me a set of VMs for their product, so I could test a new config. It was great in that it was just like production, but not so great in that it was just like production. How do I log into these VMs? How does authentication work? Where are things located on the VMs? How do I generate an updated VM? You end up having to train everyone in dev ops, because you've handed them a copy of production.
I've found that this is simply the reality, excepting test-only environments. Developers need to be able to run the applications out of an IDE, compiled with special instrumentation, or whatever else they need to do. It's not possible to support every combination of what they need.
Also, there's some significant developer overhead sometimes. I had another team give me a set of VMs for their product, so I could test a new config. It was great in that it was just like production, but not so great in that it was just like production. How do I log into these VMs? How does authentication work? Where are things located on the VMs? How do I generate an updated VM? You end up having to train everyone in dev ops, because you've handed them a copy of production.