[dpods]

We run our infrastructure off of cloudflare, so we can easily spin up a staging environment that's an exact replica of production (only difference is # and size of instances). We also run a staging jenkins server that's defined in the cloudflare config.

We keep our jenkins jobs version controlled by checking in each job's config.xml into a git repo. In the past I've seen the config.xml files managed by puppet or other config management tools.

This helps us get around the "hard to backup" and "test in production" issues. We can test out jenkins changes in staging, commit those changes to our jenkins repo, and then push up the config.xml file to the production jenkins server when we're ready to deploy.