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Testing in 'production' has been possible for a while: Heroku has Review Apps, and Render (where I work) has Preview Environments [1] that spin up a high-fideli

by anurag 6y ago

Testing in 'production' has been possible for a while: Heroku has Review Apps, and Render (where I work) has Preview Environments [1] that spin up a high-fidelity isolated copy of your production stack on every PR and tear it down when you're done. [1] https://render.com/docs/preview-environments https://render.com/docs/preview-environments

nrmitchi 6y ago
There are a variety of other, similar Preview Environment offerings out there, and most PaaS offer their own options built in. If you're using a PaaS with a built-in solution, you'll almost always be better off using theirs. A lot of the difficulty comes when you've "outgrown" a PaaS for one-reason-or-anyother, and need to try to back-fill this functionality in a production-like fashion. If you're intereseted, I wrote a thing attempting to cover some of the options ~6 months ago, but recognize that there has been a fair amount of change in the space since then (I really should update the post). [thing: https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product-review-tools/ https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product...]
- anurag 6y ago
  Great article and certainly worth an update! Specifically for Render, you can now: 1. Specify a TTL on inactive PRs 2. Pick less expensive plans for preview services.
sebmellen 6y ago
Hey, a question about Render — do you run your own base infra/colocate or do you use a VPS/bare metal setup or do you sit on top of a cloud? I love the service but I’m wondering if you’ll expand outside of the two available regions anytime soon. I understand this might be hard based on your infra setup.
- anurag 6y ago
  > I love the service Thanks! We will absolutely expand beyond Oregon and Frankfurt later this year. Our infrastructure was built to be cloud agnostic: we run on AWS, GCP, and Equinix Metal.
rutchkiwi 6y ago
This is cool - does it also copy over the data and schema of the production db? For instance on an eCommerce site, will I get my production product data to test on in stage?

by anurag 6y ago

nrmitchi 6y ago

There are a variety of other, similar Preview Environment offerings out there, and most PaaS offer their own options built in. If you're using a PaaS with a built-in solution, you'll almost always be better off using theirs. A lot of the difficulty comes when you've "outgrown" a PaaS for one-reason-or-anyother, and need to try to back-fill this functionality in a production-like fashion. If you're intereseted, I wrote a thing attempting to cover some of the options ~6 months ago, but recognize that there has been a fair amount of change in the space since then (I really should update the post). [thing: https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product-review-tools/ https://www.nrmitchi.com/2020/10/state-of-continuous-product...]

anurag 6y ago
Great article and certainly worth an update! Specifically for Render, you can now: 1. Specify a TTL on inactive PRs 2. Pick less expensive plans for preview services.

sebmellen 6y ago

Hey, a question about Render — do you run your own base infra/colocate or do you use a VPS/bare metal setup or do you sit on top of a cloud? I love the service but I’m wondering if you’ll expand outside of the two available regions anytime soon. I understand this might be hard based on your infra setup.

anurag 6y ago
> I love the service Thanks! We will absolutely expand beyond Oregon and Frankfurt later this year. Our infrastructure was built to be cloud agnostic: we run on AWS, GCP, and Equinix Metal.

rutchkiwi 6y ago

This is cool - does it also copy over the data and schema of the production db? For instance on an eCommerce site, will I get my production product data to test on in stage?