Yeah first thing I thought of was Gitlab environments / "review app" concept when reading this, we tried using Gitlab environments and ended up rolling our own on top of Kubernetes as it seems like an under-loved area of their product with a few warts.
On demand envs for teams is a incredibly liberating experience for people who have been tied down to a single or small number of environments forever, our devs have been very happy with it. There are some interesting problems on demand environments create that persistent environments don't have, like data seeding for your apps (as naive state is an env comes up blank), extracting secrets/keys/credes/certs from the env now that they are different everytime you deploy etc. We have patterns for these problems now and has really forced us to mature our process.
Hey there, product manager at GitLab for review apps here. I'd love to hear about the warts that you ran into that caused you to move to k8s. We're always working on improving the product and feedback like yours is really the most valuable thing for us.
Gitlab is great for someone already using it and is familiar with their configuration syntax.
Dockup has these:
- Seeding DBs with prod-like data is easy and works super fast so you don't have to wait around for a long time until you do a database dump/restore. We can do this in Dockup because we can maintain a pool of single-use DBs for your deployments.
- Deployment form to mix and match different versions of your apps (example: you can try how branch-foo of frontend and branch-bar of backend work together)
- Users who know how to write Dockerfiles can easily setup Dockup. Many of our users are project managers and QA and they find the UI easy to use.
On demand envs for teams is a incredibly liberating experience for people who have been tied down to a single or small number of environments forever, our devs have been very happy with it. There are some interesting problems on demand environments create that persistent environments don't have, like data seeding for your apps (as naive state is an env comes up blank), extracting secrets/keys/credes/certs from the env now that they are different everytime you deploy etc. We have patterns for these problems now and has really forced us to mature our process.