The hidden cost of environment drift
Two teams, same company, same platform, same quarter. Team A ships to production three times a day. Their environments are defined in code, provisioned the same way every time, and a new engineer can get a working setup before lunch. Team B ships once every two weeks, if the release window holds. Their staging environment has diverged from production in ways nobody fully remembers approving. Getting a new engineer set up takes a week of Slack messages to whoever still remembers how it was done last time.