Coherence is obviously trying to sell you their product here but I'm not sure preview environments and staging environments are opposed.
They way I've set things up at my current company is this:
When a developer creates a pull request an ephemeral (preview) environment is generated.
When that code is merged it automatically gets deployed first to our staging environment and then immediately to production.
Staging gets a sanitized copy of production's data every night so both the code and the data are close mirrors of production and that's what developers (and those preview environments) integrate with when they're calling services other than their own.
If you were to get rid of staging would you stand up your entire backend every time you made a preview environment? Does that include replicating databases or would you just use seed data that may or may not resemble what's in production?
It seems like the solution they're pitching works great if you have a small team and only a few services/sites.
They way I've set things up at my current company is this:
When a developer creates a pull request an ephemeral (preview) environment is generated.
When that code is merged it automatically gets deployed first to our staging environment and then immediately to production.
Staging gets a sanitized copy of production's data every night so both the code and the data are close mirrors of production and that's what developers (and those preview environments) integrate with when they're calling services other than their own.
If you were to get rid of staging would you stand up your entire backend every time you made a preview environment? Does that include replicating databases or would you just use seed data that may or may not resemble what's in production?
It seems like the solution they're pitching works great if you have a small team and only a few services/sites.