Building Preview Environments

Building Preview Environments

Preview or ephemeral environments are one of the most useful DevOps CI/CD features that you can add to your team's capabilities. As agile and DevOps main goals have always been to enable fast feedback and experimentation.

In this article, we will guide you through: what is preview environment is and important implementation considerations. Based on our last 7 years of experience building such a feature

What Are Preview Environments?

Preview environments or ephemeral environments (PE) are on-demand self-service created application versions. PE's are one of the most valuable features of CI/CD DevOps platform offerings. This is due to the following reasons:

• Faster feedback cycle as software features or bug fixes can be demonstrated and tested in an integrated environment;

  

  
  

• Reduced congestion comparing to shared environments as most unit/integration/acceptance testing can be done in separate environment;

  

  
  

• Better overall reliability and resilience for infrastructure, as environment setup is part of the daily routine, not just an exception. Assuming that the same configuration is being used to provision PE's and standard environments. And corrective measures were applied

  

  
  

Preview Environment Design Considerations

We have been implementing preview environment features for more than 6 years. During this time, processes have become much easier, but still there are considerations that need to be addressed to archive the best results

Buy vs Build

When we started implementing PE, it was a desirable but exotic feature. Now it's a pretty common feature for many CI/CD vendors. However, in most cases, those who need PE's have some build infrastructure in place. GenAi have, significantly, reduced costs for "build" option. Our recommendations:- When starting fresh or rebuilding CI/CD infrastructure, consider PE feature requirement. This is not a nice-to-have feature as it brings significant value for the organization;- Don't extract PE workflows from common CI/CD infrastructure in a separate product/platform, without integrating the developer workflow. - If starting from scratch, build is preferable, but if existing infra exists, build/extend. Of course, each case is different.