A staging environment is a near-exact replica of your production environment that you use to test app changes before sending those changes to your production environment.

Having a staging environment is important because it allows you to detect issues with app changes before those changes are introduced into your live app. Detecting new issues before they reach your customers helps save your customers unnecessary headaches, builds & preserves trust with your customers, and saves you from an increased support burden.

Near-Exact Replica

To effectively uncover issues before they are caused in production, a staging environment should be a near-exact replica of your production environment. It should run on equivalent hardware as your production environment and have an equivalent server and app configuration.

There should be no significant differences between your staging environment and your production environment that make it likely for issues to occur in production but not in staging. If you're routinely experiencing production issues that you cannot replicate in staging, you should re-examine your staging server configuration to make sure that it's a near-exact replica of production.

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