Ask HN: How is the staging/dev environment setup at your workplace?
Over the years I’ve realised the importance of services and have adopted that strategy over time. With multiple micro services comes the problem of discovery, config management and tooling around it so we created ansible playbooks with configurations for 3 main environments. However we were still hosting these services the old school way of running it directly on VMs. A few major problems arise due to this.
- There are 3 pre-defined environments. prod, stage and test. To create an environment, lets say for individual developers, a lot of manual work is involved. - Infrastructure cost increases linearly with every new environment we spawn. - Service discovery, config management becomes a mess.
A few months ago after reading about Kubernetes and how it solves most of these problems, I’ve created pods for most of our services (mostly using brute-force), this is just a start and I’ve made notes of all technical debts which have been accumulated during this process. The immediate consumers of this platform is the QA team. Long term plans also involve replaying production traffic on this cluster and to bench it out.
My questions:
- How is the staging cluster setup in your organisation? - What are some of the learnings and the problems faced while building it? - Is the thought process of having a working cluster for every developer make sense?