Avoid sequential processing and long testing queues using ephemeral environments.

Because of shared development and test environments, current software development processes work sequentially; forcing developers to wait for an environment to become available in order to validate a change.

Sharing environments for testing is always a challenge because multiple developers use it for various changes and the versioning may not align. Plus the sheer volume of requests mandates that the validation of pull requests (PRs) becomes sequential, this process causes bottlenecks and delays your PR. And, if the PR fails in testing, the whole cycle starts again — consuming resources and time while increasing change failure rates and your cost.

The long waits caused by queuing forces the testing process to be sequential. 

Sequential processes delay the releases, and you lose on the opportunity cost of that change.

Similarly, the way pull requests and private branches are short-lived, the environment must only be for the lifecycle of your PR. So, the environment must be ephemeral. It must launch/start when needed and shut down once your PR is merged or a private branch is deleted.

Parallel Development vs Sequential Development


Sequential development is a methodology in which each stage of the software development process is consecutive and leads to the next without overlap. This process emphasizes a linear progression similar to the traditional waterfall methodology. In contrast is parallel development which allows engineers to work on multiple software development projects or features at the same time.

 

Roost’s Ephemeral Devops Platform provides the ability for parallel development 

The Roost platform creates an ephemeral environment at every pull request. It auto-discovers your dependencies and runs test cases against it for validation. It is available for preview and is shareable via a URL; it will be destroyed once the PR is validated and merged for release.

The environment is private to you and the PR. The isolated nature of the environment enables you to run your PRs in parallel. 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.

Parallel development increases your release efficiency providing faster delivery faster and creating more value for your customers. ​​Since the Roost environment is isolated and private to the developer and defined by a pull request, numerous PRs can be run in parallel. This avoids bottlenecks in QA waiting for a testing site and helping to get releases shipped faster.

 

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Sudhir Jangir

About Sudhir Jangir

Sudhir is the CTO and Co-Founder of Roost. He has 20 years of experience developing enterprise applications and leading technology teams.

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