[talove]

The reason every complex application I've worked on has had a staging environment is because you do need to test production deploys in an environment that mirrors production dataset and infrastructure. Especially with data migrations, distributed databases. That is prohibitively expensive and not feasible to run in n+1 envs.

[jcraft]

Big if, but if you can use database containers it's relatively low cost to spin them up in a namespace, load data from a database snapshot, run the migration, and then tear down the container or even the entire namespace.