CHICAGO — For developers, previewing and testing features can be challenging. It can act as a bottleneck on development pipelines and negatively impact the quality and performance of your code once it’s pushed into production.
Signadot offers developers help — it allows them to test microservices inside Kubernetes clusters so they can still leverage the advantages of scale that microservices offer without the complexity that they sometimes entail.
At November’s KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America, Arjun Iyer, CEO and co-founder of Signadot, demoed the tool to The New Stack’s editor in chief Heather Joslyn for an episode of TNS Demos.
Taking viewers through an example scenario, he showed how Signadot integrates with GitHub Actions, which makes it easy for the user to test a pull request. “As soon as the pull request is published, you see that preview and environments get automatically generated,” he said. “And the URL is posted as a GitHub comment, which links to the Signadot dashboard.”
The tool isn’t just designed for individual developer workflows, however. It also facilitates collaboration between developers by allowing preview environments to be shared and combined, allowing for a more sophisticated level of testing.
“Where it starts to get interesting is I can actually combine the two different changes, and create a third preview environment that’s independent of the previous two,” Iyer said.
He added, “Once you’re satisfied with the testing, they can merge the code and it goes into the trunk branch. And then from there, the CI/CD process usually takes over.”
Better Cost Savings and Developer Experience
Iyer sees the benefits of Signadot as twofold. The first, he said, is that “this is the most cost-effective way to scale preview and test environments for microservices … because every preview environment is only duplicating a few microservices that have changed
“You can have hundreds, and still be able to offer preview environments at every [pull request] level, to the entire engineering organization.”
The other benefit, Iyer said, “is developer experience. It’s so easy for developers to create preview environments very, very quickly. And so it’s very fast.
“Developers can actually collaborate with other developers very, very easily using Signadot. And because you can combine previews from multiple PRs, you can test entire features end-to-end before you merge.”
Developer experience is a complicated beast — simplifying and streamlining it isn’t something that can be solved overnight. But check out the demo video to see how Signadot is helping improve this important and often difficult stage of the development process.
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See how Signadot allows developers to test microservices inside Kubernetes clusters, in this demo recorded at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America.