Testing is an integral part of any DevOps release cycle and many continuous integration (CI) tools have “run tests” as one of the software development processes. Because of all the delays and frustrations associated with traditional static test environments companies are now moving to a more modern tool for their cloud development needs and automated testing requirements.
Ephemeral DevOps platforms are that tool.
How Ephemeral Environments Become Pre-production Testing Environments
The only way to ensure a code change is 100% accurate and ready to merge into production is to test the changes in a production-like environment that mirrors the entire production application. Hand crafting these environments for every PR or code change is impossible – and at the end of the day they they are still just a snap shot of your app and usually static and stale.
This is where ephemeral environments comes into play.
An ephemeral environment by design is dynamic and runs “test cases” automatically and “learns” from system behavior so it can run dependency tests in a much faster and more efficient way. When a PR is merged (or a change moves to the next step) it’s already validated and ready for production.
This eliminates the need for another test environment.
How an ephemeral devops platform process works:
- Discover pre-production configuration
- Connect to your service repos, define your build/deploy/test configs
- On creation of a pull request a pre-production environment is automatically launched for just that code change
- Test your code changes
- Platform learns more about service dependencies (e.g. next cycle, test only dependent services, etc.)
- Take a snapshot for approval/validation/replay
