Define what is needed to provision a test environment similar to production, for real benchmarking

We would like to simulate the production traffic in a separated test environment. Considering:

• At least one host as production to emulate the traffic from the primary. ( 96 cores, 624 GB Mem and data folder of 7 GB)
• 2 hosts with 2 pools of pgbouncer ( 1 host for web-api, 1 host for sidekiq) we could start with 2 nodes in each pgbouncer pool.
• 2 hosts to start JMeter.

This is an initial idea, after the project gets more mature, we will require more hardware to simulate or generate the production traffic.

We need to rollout this environment in a secured environment. The main reason is that we could restore a backup and have the benchmark and performance analysis executed by infrastructure and do not sharing any PII data with external applications and users.

Initially, we could consider :

• Restore project. Where we restore our backups.
• Create a new environment in GCP or a VPC ( Virtual Private Cloud).