The staging stage of the API lifecycle is where we harden the deployment of an API, testing the contract, performance, and security of each API. This stage should have a supporting gateway that APIs can be deployed to, working with staging backends to make sure an API does everything it is supposed to before it is released into production.
Staging environment is made available to trusted consumers, allowing them to also validate the API meets their needs. Staging allows for the hardening of APIs by teams producing APIs, while also bringing a handful of consumers to test it out, using the same resources needed to access an API in production, just applying a staging URL as part of environments used to engage with documentation, SDKs, and other resources.