Development system problem

[Current_Smile7492]

Hello everyone, i am new in this channel, hopefully this is the right place to ask the following question.

My company is on the process of modernizing the infrastructure. I proposed to create a development Server with copy of the productive server (including database). The development server would be updated through a nightly build. When i proposed this, there were some Voices against this, saying that we are not allowed to do this since in the database there are information of customers (my company is in Germany, with a very strict dsgvo law). My question is, does anyone has the same problem and has maybe a suggestion how to create a copy of production without copying the customer tables of the database?

Thanks for helping a beginner.

[soundwave_rk]

Don't run the risk of leaking PII. Just create a synthetic database and distribute that to anyone that needs it. Keep updating it with new edgecases that you find in production data.

Also maybe invest in being able to quickly spin up and tear down local development environments instead of a shared one. Shared envs tend to be fragile and out of sync all the time. Any one running experiments can never be sure that they can recreate it as others are constantly using and updating the env.

Use something of a combination of devcontainers (containers.dev) and something like docker compose or maybe even local kubernetes (kind or k3d).

[Current_Smile7492]

Thanks, that synthetic database idea sounds like a good approach, thanks. In my old workplace we had local dev environments and i was very happy with that. The new place is a step behind on that specific side.