With the number of services proliferating, developers are working on a smaller and smaller subset of them. This has made effective testing of a service change and Pull Request with dependencies a monumental task. For accurate testing and certification to occur the entire application must be available, which is a time-consuming and daunting endeavor.
Current processes require developers to wait in a queue before their pull request (PR) can be tested or is accessible to a QA/staging environment for collaboration and certification. This process delays PRs from merging into the main branch thus delaying releases. And, to make matters worse, if the PR fails in testing the whole cycle starts again — consuming resources and time while increasing change failure rates.
It is time for a change.
It is time for a new software development platform.
A platform that provides an on-demand pre-production environment that is available to the engineering team, when a PR is pulled (including minimum dependencies needed in order to conduct thorough testing).
With the Roost platform, service dependencies are auto-discovered. Pull requests do not need to be put in a queue for testing nor wait for availability on a static staging system.
Roost environments can be accessed simultaneously by QA teams, software architects, security architects, and team-leads to test cloud-friendly, cloud-native, or container-native applications much earlier in the DevOps life cycle. This strategy significantly eliminates PR deployment delays and therefore reduces cost.
Roost environments are ephemeral; it gracefully shuts down, once testing and collaboration are complete. The environment snapshot is available for future reference or if a replay is needed. The link to the snapshot can be attached to your existing ticketing system. It can also be added to the PR merge comments.
This ephemeral environment can be created in multiple ways:
- As part of the pull request life cycle
- On-Demand
- Scheduled
Roost updates service dependencies in a real-time way so that developers always get the latest working environment. Learn more about ephemeral environments as a service by downloading our white paper on ephemeral enviornments.
