Staging environment differs from the production environment

The staging environment is different from production in many aspects. Using this issue to gather the differences and any issues related to this.

Differences

	Staging	Production
Database instance type	n1-standard-8 (8 vCPUs, 30 GB memory)	n1-highmem-96 (96 vCPUs, 624 GB memory)
Database cluster size (instance count)	6	12
Database size	0.5 TB	4 TB
Traffic	nearly none	production traffic
Statement timeout	10s	15s

Issues

• Query times are perceived to be slower in staging than in production (observation by @stanhu from performance bar comparison)
• Issue with post-deploy migration: Query times out in staging, not in production !15137 (merged)