Flow Preview Environments

Overview

Preview environments are a powerful software testing pattern whereby you create a near clone of a dev environment with the code of a feature branch during the duration of a pull request. This has a few great benefits:

1. Reduces churn in your dev environment, improving overall stability - which is a common failure in large organizations with many in-flight changes
2. Makes it easier to test code in isolation - the code only has the changes happening in your branch
3. Reduces dev data corruption issues - true if you implement database forking as part of the preview, making it easy to test things like schema migrations

This is extremely easy to implement with Plural because of a few things:

• GitOps patterns make it really easy to redeploy and reconfigure services
• Plural already has the webhook and event system to track PR updates natively implemented within its server
• Plural also already has a secure way of managing SCM credentials, so it can natively implement the Github/Gitlab comment feedback to make an ideal DevEx around preview environments

Demo Video

If you just want to see it in action, here's a quick YouTube video demo:

How to Implement

Implementing preview environments is quite simple. You functionally just need to register one custom resource, a PreviewEnvironmentTemplate like below: