Comment by edrenova

The ideal experience is that you anonymize prod and sync it locally. Whether it's for testing or debugging, it's the only way to get representative data.

When you write mock data, you almost always write "happy path" data that usually just works. But prod data is messy and chaotic which is really hard to replicate manually.

This is actually exactly what we do at Neosync (https://github.com/nucleuscloud/neosync). We help you anonymize your prod data and then sync it across environments. You can also generate synthetic data as well. We take care of all of the orchestration. And Neosync is open source.

(for transparency: I'm one of the co-founders)