I remember the first time I used a Drush site alias. Someone in the team mentioned them and after reading the documentation, I set up one for the production environment. Then, to test it, I entered drush @prod.example.com core-status. Drush silently logged in to the production server, ran the command, and printed the result back to my screen. It was a revelation. Until then, running Drush commands in the production environment involved:
Opening a remote session with the production environment
Changing directory to the root of the Drupal project
Running Drush commands
Closing the remote session
The fact of being able to run Drush commands for the production environment from my local environment was mind-blowing. A stream of ideas came to my head: I would be able to check module versions, run a small piece of code to test something, download the database and files, and so on. All my respects to the Drush team (especially to Greg Anderson) for creating...