What kind of safeguards do you use to avoid accidentally making unintended changes to your production environment?

Question

Because we don't have a good staging environment we often have to debug issues on our production systems. We have web, application, and database servers.

What kind of safeguards do you use to avoid accidentally making unintended changes to your production environment when doing this?

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EDIT:

The application is a very complex B2B vertical web application. There is a lot of data involved. Some tables have close to 100 million records.

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EDIT:

The staging environment we have in place does not have the capacity to mirror production. There are also hundreds of gigabytes of data files involved besides the actual database data.

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EDIT:

We do use source control for the code but not for the stored procedures. There are some old stored procedures in source control but nobody keeps that updated anymore.

The main concerns are the database and data on the file system.

BTW, I am a consultant at this company, not an actual employee.

Answer 1

The most direct answer is: "Don't do that."

Answer 2

source control. nothing like a rollback when things to irreparably wrong. Also, a diff can help you replicate the changes to other production systems.