Currently at my company, we have three servers: Development , Staging, and Production. When a new feature is requested, it is developed in the 'Development' environment (server/VM). Once the developer is satisfied that it's complete, they move it to the Staging environment and test it. Once it is fully tested, it is moved to the Production server.
The problem is that the team is very small and it's hard to manually maintain the Staging and Production Environment. We need the staging environment to be exactly like the Production environment, and it is time consuming task to do that manually everytime.
Is there a software out there that can help? or a process?
One method we thought could be possible is Cloning the Production Environment every time and use it as Staging. Once the feature is tested, merge the two VM's. But that might take a lot of time and cause downtimes on production environment.
Any hints/suggestions?
Thanks
I would suggest you to have a look at an environment provisioning tool like Ansible, Puppet or Chef. It requires some time to get used to it but after that you'll be able to auto provision any system (be it a server or just a developer machine) with just a few terminal/command line commands.