It's not necessary to use a two (or more) physical copies of application files in that scenario. You can have two different application folders but application files in one of them can be just hardlinks to the same files in the other folder and only label files can differ. In that case AOSes that use both of the application folders will actually work with the same «physical» application files so that you wouldn't have to sync the applications (which is vital if two or more applications are used with the same database). But anyway such an approach requires very careful application maintenance.
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