To expand on this further, my primary objective is to be able to develop without regard for backing services for which I have a proper abstraction layer (e.g., ORM). In my opinion, it is a mistake to think you can mirror production in a local env, because, no matter what, there will be at least one difference that catches you off guard, not to mention the cost of maintaining a golden setup and teaching debs how to use it (even with the advent of Docker, etc.). If you decouple your application from its backing services by design, you will save many man months down the road.
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To expand on this further, my primary objective is to be able to develop without regard for backing services for which I have a proper abstraction layer (e.g., ORM). In my opinion, it is a mistake to think you can mirror production in a local env, because, no matter what, there will be at least one difference that catches you off guard, not to mention the cost of maintaining a golden setup and teaching debs how to use it (even with the advent of Docker, etc.). If you decouple your application from its backing services by design, you will save many man months down the road.