AFAIK staging deployments are intended for testing Azure roles which implies that I could deploy a role with errors in code into staging. If that error damages my data I could be screwed.
How do I address that? I can't stage a role without reasonable data (hard to test it) and I can't let an unstable role damage the data.
Do I have to maintain a separate dataset for staging? How is this problem typically solved?
AFAIK staging deployments are intended for testing Azure roles which implies that I could deploy a role with errors in code into staging. If that error damages my data I could be screwed.
Staging is really designed to be a place for deployment - for spinning up new role instances prior to the instant virtual IP address swap. While you can do some testing there - e.g. making some final checks that your deployment is valid - it's not really there to allow you to do lots of testing.
How do I address that? I can't stage a role without reasonable data (hard to test it) and I can't let an unstable role damage the data.
I've generally tested on a development environment with fake data or deployed as a separate Azure service with fake data. However, I admit this has never been in the situation where I've needed huge amounts of data for testing - generally these tests have been test deployments with just 1 or 2 users.