[edgan]

Terraform leads to this pattern. Unless you can make your environments exact mirror images of each other, this is what you end up with. Almost no one does exact mirror images for cost reasons. Every environment would have to be at production scale.

[scubbo]

The "this" in your second paragraph has an unclear referent. Are you saying that copy-pasted code definitions per-environment are necessary unless those environments are exact mirror-images? If so, that is untrue - CDK (and, I assume, any other IaC framework, with the appropriate terminology change) allows Constructs to be instantiated with different variables. For instance, you could have a Construct for your environment that accepts a `numServers` variable, and instantiate that Construct multiple times with different variables for beta, gamma, etc. Only one instance of the definitional code, but multiple instantiations.