What is Nullstone Preview Environments?
Nullstone Preview Environments is a tool to launch/manage/destroy temporary environments. Nullstone is cloud-agnostic and platform-agnostic supporting any architecture.
Guides
Want to jump right in and get your hands dirty? The following guides provide step-by-step instructions for launching preview environments using Nullstone.
Launch a sample preview environment using a demo product with Nullstone Terraform modules
Launch a preview environment of your product using Nullstone Terraform modules
Launch a preview environment with your application code and your Terraform modules
Why use Preview Environments?
When developing and testing new features or bug fixes, software teams need environments that are close to production. A staging environment is a great place to start, but teams quickly face contention over the environment. Someone pushes code that breaks a workflow, adds bad data, or slows down the app. When issues arise, teams are pulled away from product iteration to maintain and stabilize the staging environment.
Preview Environments is a technique to efficiently manage isolated environments for each feature, bug fix, or team initiative. In essence, developers can create as many "staging" environments as they need.
Why use Nullstone?
Nullstone provides a self-service portal, orchestration, and third-party integrations for developers to mimic production scenarios. Most in-house solutions for preview environments are costly and distracting; most internal initiatives fail to gain strong adoption. Instead, Nullstone is a snap-in solution providing a robust developer experience that relies on your cloud accounts, infra assets, and tooling.
Even with complex architectures, Nullstone can launch an entire environment (frontend, backend, datastores, etc.) in under 10 minutes. Nullstone offers full isolation for these environments while greatly reducing the total cost burden; for many teams, their "staging" budget increases by ~10%. The following is a list of key features that makes Nullstone a great fit for preview environments:
- Orchestrates entire stack (frontend, backend, datastores, secrets, etc.)
- Can handle any architecture
- Can use vanilla Terraform modules
- Bring your own AWS
- Cost guard rails
- Compliance-ready
- Support for SSH access and hot reload
- Integrations with GitHub and Slack
You can use Nullstone Preview Environments for the following use cases:
- End-to-end Tests
- Performance Tests
- Penetration Tests
- Customer Demos
- Internal Demos
- Infrastructure Prototypes
- Infrastructure Tests
- Infrastructure Migrations
How does it work?
- Through the portal or GitHub pull request, a user requests a new preview environment.
- Nullstone uses the predefined architecture (defined in the GitHub repo or manually in the UI) to orchestrate the provisioning of Terraform modules.
- Once the environment is ready, notifications are sent to the pull request or a Slack channel.
- When new code is pushed to the pull request, Nullstone applies infrastructure changes and deploys the latest code.
- Finally, when a user is done with the preview environment, Nullstone destroys the environment by closing (or merging) the pull request or through the portal.
Read more @ How It Works.