Reddit Experience · Jan 2026

Should developers have access to staging environments?

147 upvotes 172 replies

Interview Experience

In our company, developers don’t have access to the staging Kubernetes cluster at all. Only infra/ops does. The problem is that when something breaks on stage, infra often asks devs to debug applicati

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In our company, developers don’t have access to the staging Kubernetes cluster at all. Only infra/ops does. The problem is that when something breaks on stage, infra often asks devs to debug application behavior, but we don’t have access to the cluster (no kubectl, no logs from Istio/Envoy, only limited app logs in a separate log cluster). This makes debugging slow and very inefficient — every small check or change requires back-and-forth with infra, and even simple issues can take days. Is it considered best practice for devs to have at least read-only access to staging (logs, describe, metrics), or should staging be strictly infra-owned? How do you usually handle this in your teams?

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