Preview Environments #

When developing and testing new features, software teams need environments that accurately reflect production and contain a changeset for a single feature. Producing these environments is difficult, very time-consuming and is often skipped. Teams resort to setting up a single staging environment and merge all the current features into one environment. This becomes hard to maintain and even more difficult to understand when changes conflict with each other. What do you do if new features require infrastructure changes as well?

Nullstone's Preview Environments solve this by creating a clone of your production environment including all the services, databases, and additional infrastructure needed to run your application. Each environment can have its own configuration and updated infrastructure to allow for experimentation and rapid change. Each preview environment is standalone, providing an isolated environment to test and review your changes with confidence. Load seed or scrubbed data to provide a fresh predictable instance every time.

With Preview Environments you will be able to:

• Preview new functionality in a live environment as you review code changes for a PR
• Provide shareable links to stakeholders in order to collaborate and show off new upcoming features
• Run tests against a high fidelity environment; providing more predictable results as you merge into production

Workflow #

Preview Environments can be configured to launch automatically or manually:

1. Launch a preview environment any time a PR (pull request) is created in your source control system. When the PR is opened or re-opened, the preview environment will be automatically launched. When the PR is closed, the Preview Environment is destroyed.

2. Manually launch preview environments for only the PRs that you choose. From the PR, add the comment nullstone preview up to launch your preview environment. Add the comment nullstone preview down to destroy your preview environment.

As commits are made to a PR, the latest code is built and deployed to keep the preview environment up to date. Configure seed or scrubbed data to be loaded when a Preview Environment is launched.