To minimize risk during our deployments, we can create our product in a non-production environment. In our case, we will designate the AWS west region as our test location. A common practice for tiered environments includes development, testing, staging, and production. Everything below, or to the left of, production is grouped as non-production. Often there is considerable overlap in the functionality of the environments and in many organizations; they exist within the same cloud.
Our goal is to have non-production environments that have parity with production. However, as we discussed earlier, our service levels do not need to be as high in some non-production aspects. Since our data is not real, consistency is a less important piece of the puzzle for developers in their environment, whereas the test environments may need a truly durable environment to run stress tests on your systems.
Staging may be done within production if your deployment strategies allow you...