What is the main purpose and sense to have staging server the same as production?

Question

In our company we have staging and production servers. I'm trying to have them in state 1:1 after latest release. We've got web application running on several host and many instances of it.

The issue is that I am an advocate of having the same architecture (structure) of web applications on staging and production servers to easily test new features and avoid creating of new bugs with new releases.

But not everyone agree with me, and for them is not a such big deal to have different connection between staging application instances. Even maybe to have more application and connections between application on staging than on production server.

I would like to ask about pros and cons of such an approach? I mean some good points to agree with me, or some bad why maybe i don't have right. Some examples of consequences and so forth.

Answer 1

If your staging server is substantially different from your production server, then successful deployment and testing on the staging server does not tell you much about whether the world will come down crashing on you when you finally deploy to the production server.

I do not see any real advantage to your colleagues' preferred chaotic situation, to compensate for this obvious disadvantage. What do they claim they gain by letting the staging server's configuration get totally out of sync with that of the production server...?!