On Thu, 2011-04-21 at 23:10 -0700, Vimal Shah wrote:
> Will having dev and test as in-house servers run the risk of having a
> live server that is not ~100% identical?  Keeping all environments
> virtual seems to be a sure fire (not to mention expensive) way to make
> sure that all environments are as close to identical as possible.  Is
> this overkill?

Yes, they won't be identical, but that's almost always the case.  If you
think that Google has an extra set of data centers for testing, you'd be
mistaken.  But that's also the case if you had 5-10 instances in the
cloud for production -- you probably don't want 5-10 for testing as
well.  So, it's always important that your dev/test setup is a good
facsimile of production, but they'll never be the same.

		--Ted