Moving fast breaks things: the importance of a staging environment

Graphite's engineering team, known for its fast-paced culture, faced challenges with frequent regressions due to rapid development and deployment cycles. To mitigate this, a staging environment was implemented at the end of 2022, allowing for pre-production testing and enabling the team to catch issues before they affected users. This setup involved creating a separate AWS account with duplicate infrastructure to test changes rigorously. Despite initial complaints about additional wait times and the complexities of maintaining two environments, the staging bake process significantly reduced production regressions and improved team confidence. Subsequent improvements included adding an emergency deployment pipeline, a manual skip-bake command, and controls to manage deployment timing, inspired by practices from Airbnb. The staging bake has proven beneficial, offering a buffer before production deployments and facilitating smoother handling of potential issues, ultimately enhancing the deployment process and overall product reliability.

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